Science Quotes

A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as interdisciplinary, their best work bridges realms of ideas. Their histories tend to cast doubt on the wisdom of overspecialization, where bright young people are trained to become exclusive experts in one field and shun breadth like the plague.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

~ Niels Bohr

I enjoy poetry where I can talk as bizarre as I please, but theology or philosophy, I always respect the truth by taking it a step further.

~ Criss Jami

When students cheat on exams it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

~ Peter Medawar

The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.

~ Fritz Haber

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

~ Edgar Douglas Adrian

Science, in all its greatness, is still subject to human creativity. It starts the first moment a child tries to reach up and grab at the clouds. Soon, the child learns that his own hands cannot reach the sky, but his hands are not the limit of his potential. For the human brain observes, considers, understands, and adapts. Locked within the mind is infinite possibility.

~ Yukito Kishiro

When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough.

~ Jay Nichols

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.

~ Paul Karl Feyerabend

It is possible for you to realise your dream as a scientist, you must be a passionate learner and curious enough to seek this wonderful career path.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

~ Aldous Huxley

Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as See--no weapons? But no one could think of anything better.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Why are futuristic movies so primitive, violent and ugly despite having sophisticated technology? Humanity could have an incredible future if we manage the enormous challenges we face.

~ Jonathan R Banks

The cost of electrons and photons is getting cheaper all the time!

~ T. Gilling

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

Mass production keeps the world divided between consumer and producer. Demassification of production may hasten the speed towards an era of prosumers.

~ Michael Petch

Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

~ David Livingstone Smith

The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth

~ Martin J. Rees

We are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill.

~ Marc Goodman

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

~ David Pearce

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

~ Nikola Tesla

If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.

~ John Lubbock

If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.

~ Henri Poincaré

What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?

~ F. Sherwood Rowland

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

~ Bertrand Russell

The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.

~ Nikola Tesla

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

~ Nikola Tesla

It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

~ Michio Kaku

Workers must root out the idea that by keeping the results of their labors to themselves a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are so much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1,000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition. (1894)

~ Lawrence Hargrave

What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.

~ Agnes Mary Clerke

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

~ Willard Van Orman Quine

In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.

~ Jean Baptiste Perrin

Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

~ Edwin Powell Hubble

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

~ Lewis Thomas

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

~ Christopher Wren