Motivational Quotes

Science

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

- Galbraith, John Kenneth

Best Quotes about Science

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.

Einstein, Albert

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

A seared conscience is one whose warning voice has been suppressed and perverted habitually, so that eventually instead of serving as a guide, it only confirms the person in his premeditatedly evil course.

Little, Robert J.

In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.

Mccarthy, Mary

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Artaud, Antonin

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Sir Arthur Eddington

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

Rostand, Jean

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.

Shakespeare, William

10.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Pope, Alexander

11.

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

Marx, Karl

12.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

Freud, Sigmund

14.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

15.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Huxley, Aldous

16.

Conscience does make cowards of us all.

Shakespeare, William

17.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Frayn, Michael

18.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

19.

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

Fromm, Erich

20.

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

Marquis, Don

21.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

Brown, Olympia

23.

Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other -- only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

Parsons, Talcott

24.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

Diderot, Denis

25.

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its length: a quiet conscience.

Euripides

26.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

27.

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

Lippmann, Walter

28.

Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pascal, Blaise

29.

Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

Einstein, Albert

30.

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

Byron, Lord

31.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

Adams, Mike

32.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

Richard Feynman

33.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

King Jr. Martin Luther

34.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

Cronenberg, David

35.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Richard Feynman

36.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Bronowski, Jacob

37.

Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.

Dudevant, Madame

38.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

Klee, Paul

39.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

40.

Faith is a fine invention when Gentleman can see -- but microscopes are prudent in an emergency

Dickinson, Emily

41.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Clarke, Arthur C.

42.

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

43.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

Rostand, Jean

44.

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.

Froude, James A.

45.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

James, P. D.

46.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Bronowski, Jacob

47.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Connolly, Cyril

48.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

Connolly, Cyril

49.

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

Bush, Vannevar

50.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur