quotations about science
It is by examining very bare, very dull, very unpromising things, that modern science has come to be what it is.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.
PIERRE FORESTIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
A Martin Luther King Treasury
I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself.
WILHELM REICH
Ether, God and Devil
A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectable
Nothing is invincible
If we share this nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi
THE POLICE
"Synchronicity I"
The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics, politics, and judicial right consists in this--that, in place of the false and fatal abstractions set up by these doctrines, it posits true abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things, their general relations, and the general laws of their development.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Vast is the field of Science ... the more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Sir Charles Grandison
By science men may learn the mysteries of the spirit world.
JOHN DEE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Science is the poetry of reality.
RICHARD DAWKINS
"Slaves to Superstition", The Enemies of Reason
Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.
LISA RANDALL
Warped Passages
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
It was good that there should be a more diffused knowledge of the material world; and it was good, therefore, that there should be partisans of matter, believers in particles, zealots for tissue, who were ready to incur any odium and any labour that a few more men might learn a few more things.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Biographical Studies
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Consecrate the morning of your reason to the study of the sciences: they are of infinite resource in the course of life; they form the heart, polish the mind, and instruct man in his duties.
NABI-EFFENDI
Some Tracts of the Advice to His Son
On the one hand, science is indispensable to the rational organization of society; on the other, being incapable of interesting itself in that which is real and living, it must not interfere with the real or practical organization of society.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is sure of.
JEAN ROSTAND
"A Biologist's Thoughts", The Substance of Man
The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The Act of Creation
Let science, by cultivating man's intellect, elevate him to nobler and more spiritual views of God's wisdom and power.
JOSIAH P. COOKE
Religion and Chemistry
Science, for all its independent marvels, depends on sense. Science is a powerful tool, and like any other power tool, can be used well or badly. For it to foster understanding rather than constant confusion in this age of alternative and competing "truths" on every important topic, we need to use it more sensibly.
DAVID L. KATZ
"Science And Sense In A Post-Truth World: How Do We Know?", Huffington Post, September 29, 2017
The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance