science Quotes

“Science has its place in man’s search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism.”

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

“No one really starts anything new, Mrs. Nemur. Everyone builds on other men’s failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.”

“It just goes to show,” Teddy said. “Love of science is universal across all cultures.”

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.”

“Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”

“We haven’t re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past—or at least a version of the past. And I’m saying we can make a better version.”

“Your doctor Wu does not even know the names of the things he is creating. He cannot be bothered with such details as what the thing is called, let alone what it is.”

“And, you remember our original intent was to use the emerging technology of genetic engineering to make money. A lot of money.”

“Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. […] Science can never grapple with the irrational.”

″‘But they’re stories,’ I said. ‘They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.‘”

“One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off.”

“They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent.”

“’But do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that the earth was originally a sea, as we find it asserted in that large book belonging to the captain?’ ‘I do not believe a word of it,’ said Martin, ‘any more than I do of the many ravings which have been published lately.’”

“He also discovered that when he touched certain parts of the brain, he triggered long-lost childhood memories or dreamlike scenes—which implied that higher mental activities were also mapped in the brain.”

“While all other Sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”

“The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world.”

“But we loved the Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.”

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

“If they don’t do it, someone else will.”

“Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask...What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything—we didn’t know nothing about those cells and he didn’t care.”

“In modern science the methods of analysis are principally applied to investigating the nature of material entities. Thus, the ultimate nature of matter is sought through a reductive process and the macroscopic world is reduced to the microscopic world of particles. Yet, when the nature of these particles is further examined, we find that ultimately their very existence as objects is called into question.”

“There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.”

“We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.”

“Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand.”

“Antimatter is highly unstable. Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact. Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all - even air.”

“The rising and setting of the sun was once attributed to Helios and a flaming chariot. Earthquakes and tidal waves were the wrath of Poseidon. Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all gods will be proven to be false idols. Science has now provided answers to almost every question man can ask.”

“There is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.”

“Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”

“What a challenge it is, to fit on the old armor again! To test the steel of our Truth against the blasphemies of Science!”

“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”

“If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.”

“The stop-and-go signs, garish ghosts in the sleet, went through their irrelevant tomfoolery again and again, telling the glacier of automobiles what to do. Green meant go. Red meant stop. Orange meant change and caution.”

″‘(Dr. Breed) said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,’ the bartender put in.”

″‘Magic,’ declared Miss Pefko. ‘I’m sorry to hear a member of the Laboratory family using that brackish, medieval world,’ said Dr. Breed.”

″‘I’ll think you’ll find,’ said Dr. Breed, ‘that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.‘”

“For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

“Who wants to want according to a little table?”

“Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science.”

“There’s a dirty little secret that the scientific establishment has been trying to keep under wraps for years: There are many unproven theories that are being taught to people as if they were established fact.”

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”

“What do we really want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe -- which seems truly pointless -- but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.”

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’”

“Today, we’re still loaded down – and, to some extent, embarrassed – by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.”

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

“Above all subjects of study, Science is conveyed, is propagated, by books, or by private teaching; experiments and investigations are conducted in silence; discoveries are made in solitude.”

“While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought..”

“If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. ”

“We have said that primary science is the science of these things in so far as they, its subjects, are things that are, and not in regard to any other feature. Hence both physics and mathematics are to be considered mere parts of total understanding.”

“Metaphysics is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance . . . And here we will have the science to study that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which it has.”

“The word ‘mundane’ has come to mean ‘boring’ and ‘dull’, and it really shouldn’t - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from the latin mundus, meaning ‘the world’. And the world is anything but dull: The world is wonderful. There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.”

“New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.”

“Anything you don’t understand, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.”

“Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being.” She cleared her throat again. “Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.”

“You know, you can think of almost everything as a science experiment...”

“Then accumulated knowledge is not wisdom? A Great heavens, no! If knowledge were wisdom, the achievements of science would not have been converted into implements of destruction.”

“It says that this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it.”

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner. They reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

″...at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

“Science is just another word for knowledge, and knowledge in itself is neither good nor evil.”

“Well, science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.”

“Maybe earth and air accumulate, but it takes the wisdom of the Almighty God to devise the wing of a moth. If there ever was a miracle, this whole process is one.”

“I feel kind of stupid. There’s a whole bunch of science I should be doing, right?”

“According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.”

“Bite marks and hair analysis have been discredited in most advanced jurisdictions. Both belong to that pathetic and ever-shifty field of knowledge derisively known as defense and innocence lawyers as ‘junk science.’”

‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.

Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.

“All men are physico-chemically equal,”

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Each word that fell from his companion’s lips seemed fraught with the mysteries of science, as worthy of digging out as the gold and diamonds in the mines of Guzerat and Golconda, which he could just recollect having visited during a voyage made in his earliest youth.

“Do you suppose that the real savant addresses himself stupidly to the mere individual? By no means. Science loves eccentricities, leaps and bounds, trials of strength, fancies, if I may be allowed so to term them.”