quotations about science
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Every science owns kin with its sister science.
HYPATIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
The most exciting thing about being a scientist is not knowing and being wrong. Because that means there is a lot left to learn.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
"Cosmic Connections", 2011
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?
Science is the poetry of reality.
RICHARD DAWKINS
"Slaves to Superstition", The Enemies of Reason
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
Understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public -- from individual health care to national defense.
JOHN DURANT
"John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum", MIT News, September 27, 2017
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
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
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
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
Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences", Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews
Weird Science
Weird, ooo!
Magic and technology
Voodoo dolls and chants
Electricity We're makin'
Fantasy and microchips
Shooting from the hip
Something different
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.
LUCY JONES
Newsweek, October 15, 2007
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
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
Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.
PIERRE FORESTIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.
ISAAC ASIMOV
interview, Bill Moyers' World of Ideas, October 21, 1988
The only thing not worth destroying is science. That would be useless. Science is unchangeable, and if you destroyed it today, it would rise up again the same as before.
LEONID ANDREYEV
Savva