Top 53 Quotes About Great Scientists
#1. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Viktor E. Frankl
#3. Great scientists are Peter Pans, still anxious to classify and explain at an age when most people are concerned with money, power and sex.
David M. Knight
#4. [Great scientists] are men of bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.
Karl Popper
#5. Our whole lives are a struggle with mysteries. Mysteries endanger us, support us, destroy us. Our great scientists have cleared away these mysteries in some directions by deepening them in others.
Alasdair Gray
#6. The will to believe has given us our great saints. The will to doubt has given us our great scientists. The goal of the intelligent man is a character in which the will to believe of the saint and the will to doubt of the scientist meet and mingle.
Glenn Frank
#7. When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level
Brian Greene
#8. Both Newton and Darwin were driven by the data and were forced to recognize that they couldn't explain everything. It may be a characteristic of great scientists to know what to accept and what to leave out.
Lewis Wolpert
#9. I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#10. They're a lot of great scientists and their mission is to protect people. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, but it's really a people protection agency. And they're out there trying to do their job and do the science.
Josh Fox
#11. It seems we would rather have a past filled with great scientists than just great artists and writers who could dream up these wonderful and awe-inspiring creations. It's a strange irony: we're spending our time trying to find the truth in our past, but creating myths of ourselves in the present.
Aditya Iyengar
#12. All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.
Karl Pearson
#13. The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.
Martin Rees
#14. Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
Honore De Balzac
#16. Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.
Michio Kaku
#18. Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely.
Joshua Bell
#19. Clarke's First Law - Corollary: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
Isaac Asimov
#20. As neither of these two great research scientists was able to find the solution to the mystery, it is small wonder that none of their contemporaries were able to do so either.
Robert Barany
#21. Scientists are human - they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
Cyril Ponnamperuma
#22. Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.
Charles C. Mann
#23. The fact is that all the important political philosophers and scientists from the great Aristotle on, with the exception of those of the French Enlightenment and Mill, have sided with the powers that be.
Mario Bunge
#24. Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes
John Naughton
#25. Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.
Albert Einstein
#26. A National Database on Autism Research is fostering sharing of data and collaborations. Scientists are also making great strides at the interface of biology and engineering with new technologies that are laying the groundwork for future advances.
Thomas R. Insel
#27. I'm a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching.
Leonard Susskind
#28. As the great physicist Max Planck put it, scientists must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.
Robert Greene
#29. It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.
James D. Watson
#30. A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.
Leo Szilard
#31. In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.
Carl Sagan
#32. Great numbers of children will be born who understand electronics and atomic power as well as other forms of energy. They will grow into scientists and engineers of a new age which has the power to destroy civilization unless we learn to live by spiritual laws.
Edgar Cayce
#33. There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them.
As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#34. America's popular heroes have seldom been its great thinkers, and even less its scientists. The success of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' which seems to give the lie to this claim, is more the exception that proves the rule.
Seth Shostak
#35. The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others - were natives of Europe and America.
David Ben-Gurion
#36. In private life, human beings spend a great deal of time in seclusion behind closed doors (e.g., in bathrooms and bedrooms) and other partitions designed to shield their bodies from prying eyes. Scientists have determined that too much visual monitoring can be harmful to human health.
David B. Givens
#37. Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.
Bernard Beckett
#38. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton
#39. Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
Leonard Mlodinow
#40. Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed.
Johannes Stark
#41. The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it's the reverse.
Rodney Stark
#42. One of the great problems of the world today is undoubtedly this problem of not being able to talk to scientists, because we don't understand science; they can't talk to us because they don't understand anything else, poor dears.
Michael Flanders
#43. Since the topic is science, the non scientists don't get a vote. We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. This is the fallacy called Argumentum Ad Numerum, the idea that something is true because great number believe it, as in EAT SHIT, twenty trillions flies can't be wrong!
Bill Maher
#44. We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists - even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.
David Harsanyi
#45. The genius of a great magician is as impressive as the genius of a great scientist.
Amit Kalantri
#46. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.
David Berlinski
#47. About these scientists," Truman said, "we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.
David McCullough
#48. I think scientific arrogance really does give a great degree of distrust. I think people begin to think that scientists like to believe that they can run the universe.
Robert Winston
#49. The Great God Science. It has failed us, because it was never meant to be a god, but only a few true scientists understand that.
Madeleine L'Engle
#50. I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.
Albert Einstein
#51. MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.
Ambrose Bierce
#52. The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
Ayn Rand
#53. Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.
Atul Gawande
