Science Quotations

Science

Science in the broadest sense refers to any system of objective knowledge. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research.

Sourced

• We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. ... The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
  • John N. Bahcall, on the Hubble Space Telescope's capabilities for the advancement of science, quoted in his obituary at CalTech (7 September 2005)

• Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
  • Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)
• The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
  • Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)

• I'm not anti-science, I'm anti the way science is sometimes used.
  • Charles, Prince of Wales, BBC TV programme, 'Charles at 60: The Passionate Prince,' 12th November 2008.

• Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.
  • Often quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as one of his favorite remarks of Jawaharlal Nehru, though some of his earliest citations of it, in Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1967), p. 154 indicate that Nehru may himself been either quoting or paraphrasing a statement of Vinoba Bhave.

• It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
  • Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (introduction)

• Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.
  • Sir Humphry Davy, discourse delivered at the Royal Society (30 November 1825)

• There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.
  • Richard Dawkins, The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff

• All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
  • Albert Einstein, in "Physics and Reality" (1936); later published in Out of My Later Years (1950)

• All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.
  • Albert Einstein, in "Moral Decay" (1937); later published in Out of My Later Years (1950)

• The impression that science is over has occurred many times in various branches of human knowledge, often because of an explosion of discoveries made by a genius or a small group of men in such a short time that average minds could hardly follow and had the unconscious desire to take breath, to get used to the unexpected things that came to be revealed. Dazzled by these new truths, they could not see beyond. Sometimes an entire century did not suffice to produce this accommodation.
  • Charles Fabry, La vie et l'oeuvre scientifique de Augustin Fresnel (1927), p. 13

• Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
  • Richard Feynman, in "The Value of Science," address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

• Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
  • Richard Feynman, in "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", lecture at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, (1964)

• There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
  • Richard Feynman, in What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

• I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
  • Richard Feynman, in "The Value of Science," address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

• The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.
  • Richard Feynman, in What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

• The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
  • Richard Feynman, in The Meaning of it All (1999)

• No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
  • Richard Feynman, in "The Uncertainty of Values", in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (1999)

• Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation ... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
  • Richard Feynman, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

• Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.
  • Neil Gaiman in The Books of Magic (1990 - 1991)

• Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (1980), "Senseless Signs of History"

• The story of a theory's failure often strikes readers as sad and unsatisfying. Since science thrives on self-correction, we who practice this most challenging of human arts do not share such a feeling. We may be unhappy if a favored hypothesis loses or chagrined if theories that we proposed prove inadequate. But refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment, even when [...] no new and comprehensive theory has yet filled the void.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), "The Face of Miranda"

• Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies (1993), "More Light on Leaves"

• Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.
  • Stephen Hawking, prominent physicist concluded in his book Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, published in 1993.

• Science embraces facts and debates opinion; religion embraces opinion and debates the facts.
  • Tom Heehler, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus (2011)

• The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, Presidential Address at the British Association (1870); "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis", Collected Essays, Volume 8, p. 229
  • Paraphrased variant: That's what happens when a beautiful hypotheses meets a brutal gang of facts.

• The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me purely factitious, fabricated on the one hand by short-sighted religious people, who confound ... theology with religion; and on the other by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature" (1885)

• Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution, 1880
  • "On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species", Collected Essays, Volume 2, p. 227

• Science ... commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, in "The Darwin Memorial" (1885)

• Science is for the laboratory. Other men, who stand alone and face the elemental forces of nature, know that science as a shining, world-conquering hero, is a myth. Science lives in concrete structures full of bright factory toys, insulated from the earth's great forces. The priesthood of this new cult are seldom called upon to stand and face the onslaught.
  • Hammond Innes, Atlantic Fury (1962), Chapter II.2

• Some people think that science is just all this technology around, but NO it's something much deeper than that. Science, scientific thinking, scientific method is for me the only philosophical construct that the human race has developed to determine what is reliably true.
  • Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Ask a Nobel Laureate, YouTube, September 23, 2010.

• Obviously something is wrong with the entire argument of "obviousness".
  • Paul Lazarsfeld, about the interpretation of results in social science as obvious, in "The American Soldier — An Expository Review", Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 13, no. 3, (1949) pp. 377-404, 380

• Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
  • H.L. Mencken, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks 412 (1956)

• This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation.
  • Chris Mooney, about the "Religious Right's" challenges to science, in The Republican War on Science, "Epilogue"

• We're science: we're all about coulda, not shoulda!
  • Patton Oswalt (track "The Miracle of Childbirth", on Werewolves and Lollipops)

• A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
  • Max Planck. 'Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie. Mit einem Bildnis und der von Max von Laue gehaltenen Traueransprache. 35 pp. (Leipzig, 1948). Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp.33-34 (as cited in T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

• How index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of science by the tail.
  • Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), Book I, line 279.

• One science only will one genius fit, So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), Part I, line 60.

• The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
  • John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Volume III, 1853

• It may be true, that as Francis Thompson noted, "Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling a star", but in computing the motion of stars and planets, the effects of flowers do not loom large. It is the disregarding of the effect of flowers on stars that allows progress in astronomy. Appropriate abstraction is critical to progress in science.
  • Herman Shugart, in Plant Functional Types (1997 edition) by Smith, Shugart and Woodward, Cambridge University Press, p. 20

• At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.
  • Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. 2008. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Reprint. Mariner Books, p. 108.

• All the great revolutions in science start with an unexpected discrepancy that wouldn’t go away.
  • Matthew Strassler. 2011. "Particles faster than light: Revolution or mistake?". Washington Post. Page 2 of online content (closing line of article).

• The creative scientist lives in a 'wildness of logic,' where reason is the handmaiden and not the master.
  • Marston Morse
  • Chaplin, Virginia. "Princeton & Mathematics: A Notable Record". Princeton Alumni Weekly (May 9, 1958).

Scientific scepticism

• Scientific skepticism is considered good. […] Under this principle, one must question, doubt, or suspend judgment until sufficient information is available. Skeptics demand that evidence and proof be offered before conclusions can be drawn. […] One must thoughtfully gather evidence and be persuaded by the evidence rather than by prejudice, bias, or uncritical thinking.
  • Sue, Stanley (December 1999). "Science, Ethnicity, and Bias: Where Have We Gone Wrong?". American Psychologist 54 (12). ISSN 1070-1077. Retrieved on 2007-06-05.

• Isaac Asimov was a famous scientific skeptic. He had this to say:

  Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

  • Asimov, Isaac (1997). The Roving Mind. Prometheus Books. pp. 349. 1573921815.

• To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient truths; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
  • Henri Poincaré
  • Brown, Harold Chapman (April 23, 1914). "The Work of Henri Poincare". The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 11 (9): pp. 225-236. ISSN 0160-9335.

• With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign.
  • Richard S. Lindzen, "Climate Alarm: Where Does it Come From?", lecture presented to the Marshall Institute on 1 December 2004

• With respect to science, consensus is often simply a sop to scientific illiteracy. After all, if what you are told is alleged to be supported by all scientists, then why do you have to bother to understand it? You can simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief, and you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists except for a handful of corrupted heretics.
  • Richard S. Lindzen, "Climate Alarm: Where Does it Come From?", lecture presented to the Marshall Institute on 1 December 2004

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 691-92.

• 'Twas thus by the glare of false science betray'd, That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.
  • James Beattie, The Hermit.

• O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there, To waft us home the message of despair?
  • Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope, Part II, line 325.

• Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1. (1850).

• What we might call, by way of Eminence, the Dismal Science.
  • Thomas Carlyle, The Nigger Question.

• Philosophia vero omnium mater artium.
  • Philosophy is true mother of the arts. (Science).
  • Cicero, Tusculum Disp, Book I.

• There are very few persons who pursue science with true dignity.
  • Sir Humphrey Davy, Consolations in Travel, Dialogue V. The Chemical Philosopher.

• Wissenschaft und Kunst gehören der Welt an, und vor ihnen verschwinden die Schranken der Nationalität.
  • Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a conversation with a German historian. (1813).

• While bright-eyed Science watches round.
  • Thomas Gray, Ode for Music, Chorus, line 11.

• Science is the topography of ignorance.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 211.

• For science is * * * like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.
  • Charles Kingsley, Health and Education, Science.

• The science of fools with long memories.
  • Planché, Preliminary Observations, Pursuivant of Arms, Speaking of Heraldry.

• To the natural philosopher, to whom the whole extent of nature belongs, all the individual branches of science constitute the links of an endless chain, from which not one can be detached without destroying the harmony of the whole.
  • Friedrich Schoedler, Treasury of Science. Astronomy.

• A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.
  • Tobias Smollett, Peregrine Pickle, Chapter XLIII.

• Science is organised knowledge.
  • Herbert Spencer, Education, Chapter II.

• Science when well digested is nothing but good sense and reason.
  • Stanisław Leszczyński (King of Poland), Maxims, No. 43.

• Science falsely so called.
  • I Timothy, VI. 20.

• But beyond the bright searchlights of science, Out of sight of the windows of sense, Old riddles still bid us defiance, Old questions of Why and of Whence.
  • W. C. D. Whetham, Recent Development of Physical Science, p. 10.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death.
  • J. C. Ryle, p. 530.

• But when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of its best friends.
  • M. B. Carpenter, p. 530.

• Our abiding belief is that just as the workmen in the tunnel of St. Gothard, working from either end, met at last to shake hands in the very central root of the mountain, so students of nature and students of Christianity will yet join hands in the unity of reason and faith, in the heart of their deepest mysteries.
  • Lemuel Moss, p. 530.

• Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in His universe is linked to that which lies nearest the throne.
  • Edwin Hubbell Chapin, p. 531.

• What are the sciences but maps of universal laws, and universal laws but the channels of universal power; and universal power but the outgoings of a universal mind?
  • Edward Thompson, p. 531.

• Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, p. 531.

• Holding then to science with one hand — the left hand — we give the right hand to religion, and cry: "Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things, more wondrous than the shining worlds can tell." Obedient to the promise, religion does waken faculties within us, does teach our eyes to the beholding of more wonderful things. Those great worlds blazing like suns die like feeble stars in the glory of the morning, in the presence of this new light. The soul knows that an infinite sea of love is all about it, throbbing through it, everlasting arms of affection lift it, and it bathes itself in the clear consciousness of a Father's love.
  • Bishop H. W. Warren, p. 531.

Unsourced

• Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise.
  • Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality, 1996, Cambridge: MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-62119-3, page 9

• Start by eliminating the possibility of empty models by praying that Heaven will no longer put this invention of the Devil in our way. To do this, we add a constant c to our language ...
  • Proof of the compactness theorem by Henkin's method
  • Bruno Poizat and M. Klein, A Course in Model Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Mathematical Logic, unidentified edition, page 52

• Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.
  • Erwin Schrodinger, Science and Humanism, 1953, unidentified edition/chapter/page

• I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.
  • Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1859, unidentified edition/chapter/page

• One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.
  • James D. Watson, Darwin: The Indelible Stamp: The Evolution of an Idea, 2005, Running Press, unidentified edition/chapter/page

• The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia is the slow inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken.
  • Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, unidentified edition/chapter/page

• That Professor Goddard with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
  • About Robert Goddard's rocket work
  • Unidentified New York Times editorial, 1921
  • Eventually retracted in New York Times, unidentified article/editorial, July 17, 1969

• All models are wrong, but some are useful.
  • George E. P. Box

• All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
  • Ernest Rutherford
  • Variation: In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

• Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
  • Edsger Dijkstra

• Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.
  • Albert Einstein

• In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
  • Mark Twain

• ...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
  • Albert Einstein

• Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
  • Albert Einstein

• Science is all metaphor.
  • Timothy Leary

• Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
  • Adam Smith

• Science is the pavement in the pathway to opportunities
  • Jordan Campbell

• Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
  • Donald Knuth

• Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.
  • Louis Pasteur

• Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.
  • Karl Popper

• Scientific thought is the common heritage of mankind.
  • Abdus Salam

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
  • Albert Einstein

• There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
  • Robert Oppenheimer

• To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
  • Copernicus

• Physics is like sex: Sure, it may have practical results, but that is not the reason we do it.
  • Richard Feynman

• Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• We've discovered the secret of life.
  • Francis Crick, 28 February 1953

• What is a scientist after all? It is a curious person looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.
  • Jacques-Yves Cousteau

• Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
  • Carl Sagan

• Who ordered that?
  • Theorist Isidor Isaac Rabi when the muon was identified

• Science is nothing but developed perception, integrated intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
  • George Santayana

Science and religion

See also: Creationism and Intelligent Design, Evolution

• Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
  • Jasper Winkel

• The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.
  • H. L. Mencken

• A contradiction (between science and religion) is out of the question. What follows from science are, again and again, clear indications of God's activity which can be so strongly perceived that Kepler dared to say (for us it seems daring, not for him) that he could "almost touch God with his hand in the Universe".
  • Walter Heitler

• The deepest intelligence of philosophy and science are inseparable from a religious view of the world.
  • Rudjer Boskovic

• The difference between myth and science is the difference between divine inspiration of 'unaided reason' on the one hand and theories developed in observational contact with the real world on the other. [It is] the difference between the belief in prophets and critical thinking, between Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd—Tertullian.] and De omnibus est dubitandum [Everything should be questioned—Descartes.]. To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly large regions of space and time is science.
  • H. Alfvén

• The discovery of natural law is a meeting with God.
  • F. Dessauer

• I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.
  • Augustin Louis Cauchy

• I stand before you as somebody who is both physicist and a priest, and I want to hold together my scientific and my religious insights and experiences. I want to hold them together, as far as I am able, without dishonesty and without compartmentalism. I don't want to be a priest on Sunday and a physicist on Monday; I want to be both on both days.
  • John Polkinghorne

• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
  • Albert Einstein

• Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.
  • Pierre-Simon Laplace
  • Translation: I have no need of that hypothesis.
  • Reputed reply to Emperor Napoleon I of France, who had asked why he hadn't mentioned God in his discourse on secular variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter.

• Matter and mind are not separate, they are aspects of one energy. Look at the mind as a function of matter and you have science; look at matter as the product of the mind and you have religion.
  • Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

• The more we know of things, the more we know of God.
  • Baruch Spinoza

• The order, the symmetry, the harmony enchant us…God is pure order. He is the originator of universal harmony.
  • Gottfried Leibniz

• Overwhelming evidences of an intelligence and benevolent intention surround us, show us the whole of nature through the work of a free will and teach us that all alive beings depend on an eternal creator-ruler.
  • Lord Kelvin

• Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.
  • John W. Draper

• Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, letter to Charles Kingsley (23 September 1860)

• Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
  • Albert Einstein

• The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.
  • Henri Poincaré

• Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion. An infinitely old universe, always evolving may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.
  • H. Alfvén

• The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension.
  • Isaac Newton

• Those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight…
  • Blaise Pascal

• Through steady observation and a meaningful contact with the divined order of the world's structure, arranged by God's wisdom, - who would not be guided to admire the Builder who creates all!
  • Copernicus

• We may conclude that from what science teaches us, there is in nature an order independent of man's existence, a meaningful order to which nature and man are subordinate. Both Religion and science require faith in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations…..
  • Max Planck

• Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
  • Eric Hoffer

• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
  • Albert Einstein

• I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind
  • Albert Einstein

Scientists

• I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.
  • Max Born

• I never worry about the future. It comes soon enough.
  • Albert Einstein

• Nothing in this world is to be feared... only understood.
  • Marie Curie

• Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
  • Niels Bohr

• Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.
  • Albert Einstein

• Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
  • Nikola Tesla

• You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10 to the 12 to 1 against.
  • Ernest Rutherford

Science and culture

• Can science ever be immune from experiments conceived out of prejudices and stereotypes, conscious or not? (Which is not to suggest that it cannot in discrete areas identify and locate verifiable phenemonena in nature.) I await the study that says lesbians have a region of the hypothalamus that resembles straight men and I would not be surprised if, at this very moment, some scientist somewhere is studying brains of deceased Asians to see if they have an enlarged "math region" of the brain.
  • Kay Diaz, Z (unidentified periodical, possibly Z Magazine), unidentified article, December 1992

• The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
  • Carl Sagan

• The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
  • Sir Francis Bacon

• It's not exactly rocket science.
  • Said about something easy or self-explanatory.
  • Anonymous

• A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.
  • Max Planck

• Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he'll believe you.... Tell him that a bench has wet paint upon it and he'll have to touch it to be sure.
  • Raimond Verwei (also credited to Albert Einstein)

• We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
  • Carl Sagan

• Science is the refusal to believe in the basis of hope.
  • C. P. Snow

• If the author is so interested in Science, why doesn't she take a course in it?
  • Peg Bracken, I Didn't Come Here to Argue, Fawcett Crest edition, page 49.

Mistakes in science

• I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
  • Albert Einstein

• The science of Psychiatry is now where the science of Medicine was before germs were discovered.
  • Malcolm Rogers

• There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
  • Albert Einstein, 1932

• There will never be a bigger plane built.
  • A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin-engine plane that holds ten people

• I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.
  • Andreas Vesalius

External links

• Science

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