Top 100 Old Science Quotes
#1. You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.
Michio Kaku
#2. The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this since he had heard that Google Earth in turn was based on an idea from some old science fiction novel
Neal Stephenson
#3. THE OLD LAB was not used for anything much except detention. But there was still a faint smell of old science clinging to it, from generations of experiments which had gone wrong.
Diana Wynne Jones
#4. You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Alfred Bester
#5. It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw.
Augustus De Morgan
#6. Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.
Nick Lane
#8. I knew revenge like the ghost of an old friend." ~ #1001
Pippa DaCosta
#9. Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx--once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness--might Science yet summon him back?
Ian Weir
#10. BODY-SNATCHER, n. A robber of grave-worms. One who supplies the young physicians with that with which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker.
Ambrose Bierce
#11. The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.
Howard Aiken
#12. His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.
{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}
J.J. Thomson
#13. There's an old saying among scientific guys: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, ideally by dropping a cement truck on them from a crane."
Dave Barry
#14. This is not rocket science - climate science is very simple. A 12-year-old could probably understand this subject [of climate change].
Arthur B. Robinson
#15. I like the 'Science Channel,' the 'Discovery Channel,' I like 'Discovery Times,' which is a fabulous hybrid of the 'New York Times' and 'Discovery Channel.' Maybe I'm just an old man, but I like to watch that stuff.
James Marsters
#17. And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now ... or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he'll be pounding and ... will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.
Alan Moore
#18. Our challenge is to join forces of the old and the new- experience and experiment, history and destiny, the world of man and the new world of science- but always in accordance with the never-changing word of God.
Thomas S. Monson
#19. The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.
Isaac Asimov
#20. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Frederik Pohl
#21. If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.
John Burroughs
#22. Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.
Anzia Yezierska
#23. I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.
Robert Winston
#24. Ah,it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not,then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,which think themselves new; and which are yet but old,which pretend to be young like fine ladys at the opera.
Bram Stoker
#25. In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.
Paul Auster
#26. Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys' club.
Ryan Holmes
#27. We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#28. When I was 14, I thought, 'How wonderful to be a science fiction writer. I'd like to do that.' I have never lost touch with that ambitious 14-year-old, and I can't help chuckling and thinking, 'You did it, and you did it right.'
Robert Silverberg
#29. A wise man of Old Earth had once claimed that science would destroy mankind, not through its weapons of mass destruction, but through finally proving that there was no god.
Graham McNeill
#30. 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
#31. The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.
Aleister Crowley
#32. Science is proving it now and the old spiritual books said it centuries ago that negative thoughts are the primary source of all the internal and external diseases/illnesses!
Maddy Malhotra
#33. There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex.
Mark Tobey
#34. There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
Carl Sagan
#35. He it was that first gave to the law the air of a science. He found it a skeleton, and clothed it with life, color, and complexion: he embraced the old statue, and by his touch it grew into youth, health, and beauty.
Barry Yelverton, 1st Viscount Avonmore
#36. When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#37. I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
Deborah Harkness
#38. But beyond the bright searchlights of science,
Out of sight of the windows of sense,
Old riddles still bid us defiance,
Old questions of Why and of Whence.
William Cecil Dampier
#39. There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers ... 1Q84 - that's what I'll call this new world. Q is for 'question mark'. A world that bears a question.
Haruki Murakami
#40. Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
Marilynne Robinson
#41. Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.
Jonathan Swift
#42. Fletcher shrugged. "Science and mathematics are all the rage, you know. But who has time for good old Horace?
Ashley Gardner
#43. The Old Testament contains over 300 references to the Messiah that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Computations using the science of probability on just 8 of these prophecies show the chance that someone could have fulfilled all 8 prophecies is 10 (to the 17th power), or 1 in 100 quadrillion.
Fritz Ridenour
#44. It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Francis Bacon
#45. The earth is large and old enough to teach us modesty.
Hans Cloos
#46. True, science has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the moon, and yet when a man of eighty is left in a room with two eighteen-year-old cocktail waitresses nothing happens.
Woody Allen
#47. It seems to me that sometimes-or perhaps I might venture most of the time-occurrences have no cause at all. New stars appear and old ones vanish. Short hats become popular again. Things are as they are and do as they please for absolutely no reason at all.
Galen Beckett
#48. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.
Lynn Townsend White Jr.
#49. 'Snow White' is an old fairy tale, so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today's science, people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It's bizarre.
Julia Roberts
#50. Let us embrace Science and the new technologies unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease, death and the sweat of labor.
Claude Vorilhon
#51. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted.
H.P. Lovecraft
#52. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
William James
#53. The old rules may say we can't protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we've always used new technologies - we've used science; we've used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.
Barack Obama
#54. The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.
John Crowley
#55. People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.
Richard Dawkins
#56. How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
Richard Dawkins
#57. If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.
Jane Espenson
#58. Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true." - from A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject in 1851.
William Wilson
#59. I got into nuclear science when I was about 10 years old I was fascinated by the stuff. I was fascinated by the reactions and the power inside these atoms that we had the capability to unlock.
Taylor Wilson
#60. An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe.
Kelly Steed
#61. The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it
Ray Bradbury
#62. When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.
Mark Twain
#63. I think a lot of kids get scared by 'E.T.' Sometimes when I do the science-fiction conventions, I'll have a 35-year-old guy with tatts and piercings all over, and he comes up and says, 'You know, it scared me so much I still can't watch it.'
Dee Wallace
#64. He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
#65. You know, like that old Catch 42 expression that stands for the meaning of life is that in the end you always get screwed.
Jack Campbell
#66. Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
Erwin Schrodinger
#67. I remembered the old doctor, - "It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot." I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
Joseph Conrad
#68. Among minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our science.
William Stanley Jevons
#69. Witchcraft had once been widely used before cursed by the society.
I see today the society presumes technology will have a different treatment.
Toba Beta
#70. I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
S.J Perelman
#71. We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.
Alastair Reynolds
#72. Albert Einstein had Max Talmud, his first mentor. It was Max who introduced a ten-year-old Einstein to key texts in math, science, and philosophy. Max took one meal a week with the Einstein family for six years while guiding young Albert. No one is self-made.
Gary Keller
#73. Always try to innovate. If you lose your old fitness, you lose out to Bose-Einstein condensation. I am sure that companies that go under would feel better if they knew that they were victims of Bose-Einstein condensation.
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#74. By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.
C.P. Snow
#75. You ask whether I am going over to the history of science ... no, I am not as old as that.
Christopher Kelk Ingold
#76. A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced nonentity and art admired decay; The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay; Round
G.K. Chesterton
#77. Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.
Ken Wilber
#79. God exists. He has one wicked since of humor, and right now he's having a grand old time punking the planet.
Forrest Carr
#80. The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
Albert Einstein
#81. In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion, but, rather, our culture's newfound faith - science - that challenges the belief in free will.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#82. Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.
Carl Sagan
#83. Magic is an ancient practice that has power over superstitious mind.
Toba Beta
#84. If this place were closer to Terra there'd be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There'd be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.
Philip K. Dick
#85. Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.
Jeff Bezos
#86. Science really creates wealth and opportunity which did not exist before. Whereas the old order was based on competition, the new order of science makes possible, for the first time, a cooperative creative effort in which every one is the gainer and no one the loser ...
Karl Taylor Compton
#87. How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#88. I always loved science and math growing up. I was born in Iran; I grew up there and then came to the United States when I was about 16 years old. And I thought that this was my opportunity to get involved with something really cool and great.
Anousheh Ansari
#89. Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow.
Heinrich Rohrer
#90. Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.
Burton Richter
#91. I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
A.E. Van Vogt
#92. I have always had the feeling that organic chemistry is a very peculiar science, that organic chemists are unlike other men, and there are few occupations that give more satisfactions [sic] than masterly experimentation along the old lines of this highly specialised science.
Lawrence Joseph Henderson
#93. Someone is an ignoramus who would say that, 'Oh, we had three hurricanes this year. This proves that somehow the climate is warming.' The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you're going to say that we had four hurricanes and so it proves a theory?
Rand Paul
#94. No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.
Isaac Newton
#95. Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#96. When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.
James Altucher
#97. Innovative technologies such as cold fusion, and radical energy sources, including sonoluminescent-triggered fusion and anti-gravitational propulsion, are either being withheld or blocked by governments, old-fashioned science academia and multinational corporations.
Takaaki Musha
#98. Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
Alfred North Whitehead
#99. In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.
Michael Crichton
#100. He is so old that his blood type was discontinued.
Bill Dana
