Motivational Quotes

Science

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

Best Quotes about Science

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

Science is all metaphor.

Leary, Timothy

Conscience -- the only incorruptible thing about us.

Fielding, Henry

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

Mencken, H. L.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Bacon, Francis

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

Russell, Bertrand

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

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Einstein, Albert

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

Cowper, William

10.

Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure.

Hales, Stephen

11.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Marie Curie

12.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Sontag, Susan

13.

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

14.

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

Long, Lazarus

15.

Isn't it marvelous how those scientists know the names of all those stars?

16.

Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.

Byron, Lord

17.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

George Santayana

18.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

Hubbard, Ruth

19.

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.

20.

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Gourmont, Remy De

21.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Lewis Thomas

22.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

23.

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

Ivan Pavlov

24.

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Weil, Simone

25.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Stephen Jay Gould

26.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

Levi, Primo

27.

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.

28.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

29.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Dudevant, Madame

31.

Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.

Kant, Immanuel

32.

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

Einstein, Albert

33.

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

34.

O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?

Campbell, Thomas

35.

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

Ashley Montague

36.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Marie Curie

37.

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science

Einstein, Albert

38.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

40.

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of decency. The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Lewis, Wyndham

41.

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

42.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

If a superior give any order to one who is under him which is against that man's conscience, although he do not obey it yet he shall not be dismissed.

Francis of Assisi, St.

44.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

45.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

Bronowski, Jacob

46.

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

Barr, Amelia E.

47.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

48.

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

49.

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