quotations about science
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
CARL SAGAN
Keynote address to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 1987
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
KARL MARX
Value, Price, and Profit
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
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
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?
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
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"
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
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 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
Science does not reveal anything beyond this life.
PIERRE FORESTIER
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
What has science to offer? This: that we are ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed. No longer an absentee God; no longer a Great First Cause, setting in motion secondary causes which frame the world; no longer a divine mechanic, who has built the world, stored it with forces, launched it upon its course, and now and again interferes with its operation if it goes not right; but one great, eternal, underlying Cause, as truly operative to-day as he was in that first day when the morning stars sang together -- every day a creative day. That is the word of science.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God