Science Quotes

The humble Cumulus humilis - never hurt a soul.

~ Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

~ Jonas Salk

...space flight still had a long way to go to catch up with the safety record of the milkshake industry.

~ Kevin Fong

... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.“What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.“Is that what you wanted to show me?”“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”“If you say so.”Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Meg, what I'm about to do - never, ever try this on your own. I felt a bit silly giving this advice to a girl who regulartly fought monsters with golden swords, but I had promised Bill Nye the Science Guy I would always promote safe laboratory practices.

~ Rick Riordan

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.

~ Steven Pinker

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

~ Carl Sagan

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery eac

~ Albert Einstein

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

~ Albert Einstein

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

~ Isaac Newton

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

~ Albert Einstein

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

~ Carl Sagan

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

~ Richard Feynman

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

~ Michael Crichton

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

~ Ray Bradbury

God does not play dice with the universe.

~ Albert Einstein

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

~ Christopher Hitchens

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

~ Abraham H. Maslow

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

~ Albert Einstein

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

~ Carl Sagan

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

~ Stephen Hawking

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

~ Terry Pratchett

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

~ Thomas Jefferson

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.

~ Jules Verne

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

~ Douglas Adams

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

~ Nikola Tesla

Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?

~ Mark Lawrence

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

~ Antonio Gramsci

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

~ Carl Sagan

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen! If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.

~ Dan Barker

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

~ Clive James

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

~ Sigmund Freud

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

~ Daniel Kahneman