Motivational Quotes

Science

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

- Levi-Strauss, Claude

Best Quotes about Science

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

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

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Lee, Harper

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions -- largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

Kipling, Rudyard

A bad conscience has a very good memory

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Sophocles

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who can never remember where they left things.

Allen, Woody

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

Marquis, Don

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Russell, Bertrand

10.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Bronowski, Jacob

11.

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.

Hardy, Thomas

12.

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

Klee, Paul

13.

The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.

Hubbard, Ruth

14.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

Euripides

16.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

Mead, Margaret

17.

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Thomas H. Huxley

18.

If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Waugh, Evelyn

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.

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

Burroughs, William S.

21.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Lessing, Doris

22.

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.

23.

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Lorenz, Konrad

24.

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Walton, Izaak

25.

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

Pascal, Blaise

26.

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Huxley, Aldous

27.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Pascal, Blaise

29.

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

Rostand, Jean

30.

The product of mental labor -- science -- always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Marx, Karl

31.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Einstein, Albert

32.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

33.

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

35.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Carl Sagan

36.

While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

37.

Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

Barr, Amelia E.

38.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

Lucretius

39.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Joad, C. E. M.

40.

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Quincey, Thomas De

41.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur

43.

Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.

Parkhurst, Charles H.

44.

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

45.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

46.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

Cowper, William

47.

In science,'fact'can only mean'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Ashley Montague

50.

Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking.

Floyd, Keith