SCIENCE QUOTES VII

quotations about science

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

Tags: Seth Lloyd


In the history of science and throughout the whole course of its progress we see certain epochs following one another more or less rapidly. Some important view is expressed, it may be original or only revived; sooner or later it receives recognition; fellow workers spring up; the outcome of it finds its way into the schools; it is taught and handed down; and we observe, unhappily, that it does not in the least matter whether the view be true or false. In either case its course is the same; in either case it comes in the end to be a mere phrase, a lifeless word stamped on the memory.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe


Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

KARL MARX

Value, Price, and Profit

Tags: Karl Marx


Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: Edward Abbey


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


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?

Tags: Vladimir Lenin


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"


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

Tags: Walter Bagehot


Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.

PIERRE FORESTIER

attributed, Day's Collacon


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


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

Tags: Mikhail Bakunin


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

Tags: Richard Feynman


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

Tags: Edmund Burke


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

Tags: Martin Luther King, Jr.


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

Tags: Mikhail Bakunin


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


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

Tags: Lucy Jones


Science is the only religion of mankind.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Childhood's End

Tags: Arthur C. Clarke


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?


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