quotations about science
To make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization.
GEORGES CUVIER
Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles
Alas! A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections -- a mere heart of stone.
CHARLES DARWIN
letter to T. H. Huxley, July 9, 1857
On entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student's first endeavors should be to prepare his mind for the reception of the truth, by dismissing or at least loosening his hold on all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine, as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.
SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Weird Science
Plastic tubes and pots and pans
Bits and pieces and
Magic from the hand
We're makin'
Things I've never seen before
Behind bolted doors
Talent and imagination
Not what teacher said to do
Makin' dreams come true
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
ISAAC ASIMOV
"The Three Numbers", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September 1974
Doubtless it is true that while consciousness is occupied in the scientific interpretation of a thing, which is now and again "a thing of beauty," it is not occupied in the aesthetic appreciation of it. But it is no less true that the same consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the aesthetic appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation. The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view. The broader mind can take both.
HERBERT SPENCER
An Autobiography
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.
EDMUND BURKE
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth.
PAUL DAVIES
Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life
Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"Dogmatism and Freedom of Criticism", What Is To Be Done?
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Science: The creation of dilemmas by the solution of mysteries.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world--a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious--surely never again to set.
WALT WHITMAN
"Democratic Vistas", Two Rivulets
Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for a higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: He takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.
THOMAS PAINE
The Works of Thomas Paine
What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Religion and Science
Science is the only religion of mankind.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
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
Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.
LISA RANDALL
interview, The Morning News, February 9, 2006