Top 100 Hard Science Quotes
#1. If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
Frederik Pohl
#2. By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#3. It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science.
Jonathan Maberry
#4. When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.
Jane Goodall
#5. The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in 'hard' science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
#6. Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization-that something transcendent started it all-which has hard-science types ... using terms like 'miracle.'
Gregg Easterbrook
#7. Just because it's not hard science, just because it doesn't lead to a high-paying job at a hedge fund after college, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.
Kat Rosenfield
#8. Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.
Jane Goodall
#9. We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
Michael Crichton
#10. Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science.
Daryl Gregory
#11. 'Farscape' is not what you call hard science fiction.
Ben Browder
#12. The answers lie in not just hard science or philosophical rhetoric but in experiments of the imagination as well. Human perspective must be re-examined through an almost whimsical fount of imagination of species, magic, and clear creative thinking.
Leviak B. Kelly
#13. I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.
Mark Haddon
#14. We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
Jerry Pournelle
#15. Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.
Michael Kinsley
#16. Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
Antonin Scalia
#17. Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction ... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem.
Neil Gaiman
#18. Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#19. When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.
Alice Dreger
#20. Science must always clash hard with religion in order to expose man's inherent insufficiency to reason and expose the Super Being's existence.
John Onyango Agumba
#21. She waits for his reprimand or words of disapproval.
He kisses her instead. Hard. Lips demanding, fingers tightening on her chin. He consumes her with this single act.
Laura Kreitzer
#22. But as a matter of strict fact, did Agnes have any "maternal" in her? When she set her mouth that way, it was hard to see it. Oh shucks, all women had maternal instincts; science had proved that. Well, hadn't they?
Robert A. Heinlein
#23. The Lincoln Highway is to be something more than a road. It will be a road with a personality, a distinctive work of which the Americans of future generations can point with pride - an economic but also artistic triumph. (1914)
Carl G. Fisher
#24. And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#25. Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#26. Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
Richard Dawkins
#27. It is clear that there is some difference between ends: some ends are energeia [energy], while others are products which are additional to the energeia.
Aristotle.
#28. Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time.
Burton Richter
#29. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
#30. I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
Richard Powers
#31. The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.
Rene Descartes
#33. The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.
Charles H. Townes
#34. Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#35. I realize that, to many readers, Hard Fantasy may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Fantasy, according to most generally recognized definitions, differs from both 'real world' fiction and 'science fiction' in that magic or magical creatures are active elements.
Jane Lindskold
#36. Being happy is a great science. If you are not happy, do not be confused. Happiness is hard to achieve.
Peter Deunov
#37. All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them.
Charles Buxton
#38. [Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
#39. I wondered for a second why I cared so much, but I knew I did. I wanted to be more like the Upper-Cs. Not snobby or mean, but just a bit more. It was hard to explain, I just liked the thought of being dolled up and having a few nice things.
Y.A. Marks
#40. The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars ... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
Arthur C. Clarke
#41. The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried
Richard Dawkins
#42. If you publish a scientific paper it is very hard to start a nationwide debate about something. If you do this in a movie, you can start a debate. We like to create a bridge between those two worlds - film and science.
Jose Padilha
#43. The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.
Jeffrey Kluger
#44. In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, science is fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.
David McRaney
#45. For me, chess is at the same time a game, a sport, a science and an art. And perhaps even more than that,. There is someting hard to explain to those who do not know the game well. One must first learn to play it correctly in order to savor its richness.
Bent Larsen
#46. The injuries we do in kind are visited upon us often. In the science of the mind, trying hard to move a shadow.
Lou Reed
#47. I think a lot of kids are interested in two science subjects: dinosaurs and aliens. The reason is almost genetic; we're hard-wired to be interested in things that might be a little dangerous.
Seth Shostak
#48. Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.
Sharon Salzberg
#49. Life is hard, the earth stubborn, science rich in knowledge but poor in practical results.
Franz Kafka
#50. Crap this apology stuff is hard!
J.J. Snow
#51. I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#52. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene Paul Wigner
#53. It's amazing how once the mind is free of emotional pollution, logic and clarity emerge.
Clyde DeSouza
#54. There are many places that are not made for staying," Heckleck said. "They are too harsh, too hard, and too far away from whatever you call home. You don't root where you don't have to, unless you're unluck.
Cecil Castellucci
#55. I do not know why I have always been fascinated by science or why I have been driven by the intense desire to make some original contribution. And although I have had some degree of success as a scientist, it is hard to say precisely why.
Jack W. Szostak
#56. No matter how hard you try, after the Day there will always be a Night ...
Luis Marques
#57. Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!
Wolfgang Pauli
#58. I am trying to write stuff that is different. I am a big science fan. I read a lot of science, and 'Wonderland' has a lot of science in it. I don't know. They are hard to describe ... We are living in a wonderland age of science.
Bob Seger
#59. Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.
Edward Kasner
#60. I got into science because I thought that, with inspiration and hard work, I could figure out how life works.
Randy Schekman
#61. I think both running and science reflect certain character traits. I have endurance, patience, and ambition. I'm willing to work hard toward a goal, to push myself and overcome limits. Running and science both let me express these traits.
Wolfgang Ketterle
#62. Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.
Vinod Khosla
#63. I can see why you like it here," he said,making a sweeping gesture that encompassed Kyle's collection of movie posters and science fiction books. "There's a thin layer of nerd all over everything." said Jace.
"Thanks. I appreciate that." Simon gave Jace a hard look.
Cassandra Clare
#64. We affirm the neutrality of Science ... Science is of no country ... But if Science has no country, the scientist must keep in mind all that may work towards the glory of his country. In every great scientist will be found a great patriot.
Louis Pasteur
#65. I can feel my face growing warm, and I hope I'm not flushing in my terror. The feeling of helplessness and fear hits me hard, and once my mind validates the emotion, the physical fear of being maimed and eaten hits my skin as goose bumps in the heat.
Lindsay Anderson
#66. Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
#67. It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.
Questlove
#68. Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.
Tom Shippey
#69. I consider prayer to be of immense psychological benefit. But we must accept that its tangible results are often hard to see. When it comes to obtaining certain, direct results, it is clear that prayer cannot match the achievements of, for instance, modern science.
Dalai Lama XIV
#70. It is always necessary to jump up and down on the scaffold of knowledge to make sure it is solid. If you are skeptical about a scientific claim, then jump up and down on it as hard as you can until you expose a weakness or convince yourself that it is solid.
David Sloan Wilson
#71. He swallowed hard, annoyed at the sudden dryness in his throat. No reason to become all emotional about it now. He had already sold his soul for a chance at vengeance, and there was no getting it back.
G.S. Jennsen
#72. I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
Sue Monk Kidd
#73. Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural.
Edward M. Lerner
#74. Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
Jean De La Bruyere
#75. Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.
Joel Edgerton
#76. The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
Freeman Dyson
#77. My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science. I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end, if something has to go 'boom,' and it would probably only go 'fwoosh,' I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not, I think, a grave one.
Nick Harkaway
#78. Above her like this, he was a warrior god, hot and hard, demanding complete submission.
Danielle Monsch
#79. 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
#80. We do not stop. You all took the oath to come here. Hard work lies before us in breeding our new community. - Adrian
Donna Galanti
#81. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
William Hazlitt
#82. If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world.
Louis Pasteur
#83. it's hard as hell to get politicians excited about what we do out here, or about what you do, kay."
"the problem is, the dead don't vote," i said.
"i've heard of cases where they did.
Patricia Cornwell
#84. Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.
Lev Grossman
#85. My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
Rainn Wilson
#86. Anyone can get their hands on a fortune but to become successful one must work intelligent and hard.- EMW
Erik Martin Willen
#87. It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that 'the world' is mundanely 'a planet.' The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.
Douglas Coupland
#88. I think of it as a good opportunity to let, in particular, school kids know that this job and other interesting jobs in science and engineering are open to anyone who works hard in school and gets a good education and studies math and science. And that it's not just for a select group of people.
Ellen Ochoa
#89. Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work.
Thomas A. Edison
#90. If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I'm lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don't need reason - I have shoulderblades.
Alberto Caeiro
#91. After ... all the philosophy and science that we've laboured on for centuries, it's becoming very hard to find a story we can buy.
Steve Hagen
#92. You'll notice that pain isn't solid or constant but rather a series of sensations, sometimes hard, sometimes light, and even sometimes gone altogether
Ruby Wax
#93. I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn't be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola's heart beat fastest for me.
Max Barry
#94. May the work for the further development of chemical science, which has its strongest roots in this beautiful, strong and hard-working country of Sweden, continue to flourish in the future, for the promotion of culture and the benefit of mankind.
Otto Wallach
#95. The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.
A. Hunter Dupree
#96. This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
#97. But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys.
Christina Hoff Sommers
#98. This is what makes science so hard, and ultimately so fun. Think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses.
Alexei Panshin
#99. With an accelerated schedule of launch in just two months, NASA and contractor launch and support teams labor steadily with six-day work weeks by day and night shifts
Martha Lemasters
#100. Money is a tool we use to reach certain ends. Nothing more, nothing less. It's hard to come by, though, so when opportunities arise, we need to make the most of them.
Michael Monroe
