Top 73 False Science Quotes
#1. A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity.
Voltaire
#2. The whole entire existence of the pharmaceutical industry is based on presentation of false science, and advertising this false science and drumming it into the minds of gullible people who have no curiosity to find out why that is so.
Fereydoon Batmanghelidj
#3. The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
William Hazlitt
#4. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#5. Everyone has been taught that technique is an application of science ... This traditional view is radically false. It takes into account only a single category of science and only a short period of time
Jacques Ellul
#6. In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.
Brian Cox
#7. How can we assert and test hypotheses if there are no such things as assertions that can be evaluated as true or false? How can we design experiments if there is not such thing as design? How can we explain anything if we do not assert anything and if others cannot understand it?
Angus J.L. Menuge
#8. The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.
Thomas Aquinas
#9. Science destroys only the false ideas about religion; the true ideas it complements and explores.)
Susan Howatch
#10. To far too many, science is a four-letter word, and under the modern media's false equivalency standards, a handful of skeptics are viewed as counterweights to the vast majority of scientists who acknowledge mankind's proven role in global warming.
Christine Pelosi
#11. To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.
Stuart Sutherland
#12. The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid.
Ursuala K. Le Guin
#13. But yet they that have no Science , are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by their mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules.
Thomas Hobbes
#14. I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.
John Joseph Griffin
#15. Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
#16. Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins.
Kurt Vonnegut
#17. She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
Kate Atkinson
#18. The challenge of elucidating living processes
including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit'
is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions.
Peter Atkins
#19. No." A short, crazed laugh. "Juliette. Please. Please. Don't tell me he's filled your head with romantic notions. Please don't tell me you fell for his false proclamations -
Tahereh Mafi
#20. Today much of anti-biofuel "science" - including the false claim that biofuels need more energy to make than they contain - has been shown to be complete hogwash, bought and paid for by big oil.
Josh Tickell
#21. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
Charles Darwin
#22. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually "grasp" reality.
Alan W. Watts
#23. When we see things through our fixed, false beliefs, science becomes superstition.
Debasish Mridha
#24. A true religious person should not think that "my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false." Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss.
Abhijit Naskar
#25. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#26. It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest 'correct' theory declares the old to be false and erases it.
Wassily Kandinsky
#27. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.
William James
#28. Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#29. My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I'm going to believe Jesus instead.
Andy Stanley
#30. The Law of Logical Insanity: Anything that can easily be explained using common sense and rational thought is probably too simplistic and therefore false and untrue.
Ian Strang
#31. Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
Dalai Lama XIV
#33. Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.
E. M. Forster
#34. Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements
and this is untrue.
Richard Rhodes
#35. It ill becomes any of us to take the attitude that all evidence for God is false evidence, beneath consideration, simply by virtue of its being evidence for God, or even by virtue of its being outside the purview of science.
Kitty Ferguson
#36. When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
Charles Darwin
#37. We half-eat cookies and drink the milk, we leave notes, all so kids will believe in something that isn't true. Kids try their best to scientifically determine whether Santa's real and our whole culture feeds them false evidence. We dupe them.
Thomm Quackenbush
#38. Everybody knows that orthopedic science provides beautiful false noses for people who have lost their noses naturally or as a result of an operation.
Gaston Leroux
#39. Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.
P.D. Ouspensky
#41. Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Pope John Paul II
#42. To some extent we are all the prisoners of stereotypes; we see each other in terms of distorted and oversimplified images. Better communication in the realm of ideas, of the arts, and of science can help refashion these false images. And by seeing more clearly we may act more wisely.
Chester Bowles
#43. Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality
David Filkin
#44. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
Rene Descartes
#45. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.
Boris Pasternak
#46. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr
#47. But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.
Stefan Zweig
#48. A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.
Isaac Asimov
#49. The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
Stephen Jay Gould
#50. Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
Gottfried Leibniz
#51. The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.
Thomas Malthus
#52. What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
George Santayana
#53. Science seems to be at war with itself ... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
Bertrand Russell
#54. With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.
Conor Oberst
#55. In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.
Immanuel Kant
#56. I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones - by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether universe or a smaller one.
Robert A. Heinlein
#57. Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.
Sheldon L. Glashow
#58. Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.
Vivienne Westwood
#59. Still, even when false, legends can be most informative.
Timothy Zahn
#60. Everybody is always touting the division between religion and science ... That division is based on a false premise. It simply doesn't exist. The first sciences developed from a desire to prove the existence of God. In that sense, science and religion have been hand in hand from the very beginning.
A.J. Kazinski
#61. The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.
Greg Graffin
#62. When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken.
Claude Bernard
#63. It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Sigmund Freud
#64. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.
Clifford D. Simak
#65. I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.
Clifford Geertz
#66. In my experience endings are false positives. Perhaps like a phoenix, out of the ashes of destruction we could be reborn."
-Cassandra Rainbow in PHOENIX-
Vaun Murphrey
#67. The more time and devotion one spends in the worship of false gods, the less he is able to spend in that of the True One.
Isaac Newton
#68. We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming-with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy-is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels.
Zbigniew Jaworowski
#69. 'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.
Stephen Jay Gould
#70. It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.
Karl Popper
#71. We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.
Leonard Mlodinow
#73. If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
Steven Pinker
