Motivational Quotes

Science

Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about 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

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

Marquis, Don

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

Clarke, Arthur C.

Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible.

Einstein, Albert

Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

Bancroft, George

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Bronowski, Jacob

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Parkhurst, Charles H.

14.

Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.

Horton, Doug

15.

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

Sophocles

16.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.

Einstein, Albert

17.

There are no better terms available to describe [The] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former objective and the latter subjective. ... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the facts of the social sciences are also opinions -- not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist.

Hayek, Friedrich August Von

18.

Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God.

Herrman, Robert

19.

In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Lamb, Charles

20.

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

Huxley, Aldous

21.

What a man calls his conscience is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

Rowland, Helen

22.

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

Lucretius

23.

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

Klee, Paul

24.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Billings, Josh

25.

God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won t.

26.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 -- 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

Pirsig, Robert M.

27.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Asimov, Isaac

28.

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

29.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

30.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Bohr, Niels

31.

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.

Nash, Ogden

32.

I hate science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.

Bunting, Basil

33.

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

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.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

36.

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

Valery, Paul

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [Animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

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

41.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science it's opinion.

Long, Lazarus

42.

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

43.

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.

Russell, Bertrand

44.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

45.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

Neumann, John Von

46.

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Konrad Lorenz

48.

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Pasteur, Louis

49.

Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Huxley, Thomas H.

50.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Smith, Logan Pearsall