Science Progress Quotes

#1. In science, progress is a fact, in ethics and politics it is a superstition.

John Gray

#2. In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.

Nate Silver

#3. Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

Baruch Spinoza

#4. The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress. General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit.

Bernard Lown

#5. Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery.

Ernest Rutherford

#6. Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.

John Dewey

#7. And if doctor says that you don't have IBS with constipation, you might want to get a second opinion, because I had doctors that were telling me ... of course, a lot of this has to do with science - progressing.

Cybill Shepherd

#8. Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

Thomas Huxley

#9. A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child.

Kay Kenyon

#10. Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

Woodrow Wilson

#11. Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Aldous Huxley

#12. Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.

Richard P. Feynman

#13. A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

P.M.S. Blackett

#14. 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

#15. Time ... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.

Walter Bradford Cannon

#16. In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose.

Francois Arago

#17. Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

Humphry Davy

#18. Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

Stephen Jay Gould

#19. Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Mary Baker Eddy

#20. The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

Michael E. DeBakey

#21. Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.

Giordano Bruno

#22. You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

Frederik Pohl

#23. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.

Emma Goldman

#24. A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Jacob M. Appel

#25. Marx's scientific Messianism is itself of bourgeois origin. Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and
of production, are bourgeois myths, which in the nineteenth century became dogma.

Albert Camus

#26. We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard Feynman

#27. Patents do not promote progress of science and technology, Inventors do.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

#28. I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another.

Abhijit Naskar

#29. Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

Thomas Sowell

#30. It wasn't science and technology that cause a slow progress,
but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.

Toba Beta

#31. Certainly, it may bring to light such a deeper knowledge of the structure of matter as to constitute a veritable discontinuity in the progress of science.

Ernest Lawrence

#32. One may say that in a state of science where fundamental concepts have to be changed, tradition is both the condition for progress and a hindrance. Hence, it usually takes a long time before the new concepts are generally accepted.

Werner Heisenberg

#33. Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

Sydney Brenner

#34. Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Paul Gibbons

#35. Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.

Carl Sagan

#36. The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

Ayn Rand

#37. Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.

Elbert Hubbard

#38. The rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.

Benjamin Franklin

#39. The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.

Norman Lockyer

#40. Pranayam is the right science of breathing where deep, regulated and rhythmic breathing is done along with mental purification. Its practice plays an important role not only in cure of physical ailments, but also for moral and spiritual progress.

Virchand Gandhi

#41. You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

Henry David Thoreau

#42. How is AIDS research to progress when the premise of science is questioning but the premise of questioning HIV is considered so dangerous that even venturing into the facts is too great a risk?

Nate Mendel

#43. Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.

David Deutsch

#44. The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.

David Gross

#45. If you don't like the solution, change the problem.

Criss Jami

#46. In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

Natalie Angier

#47. The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

Nikola Tesla

#48. One cannot deny that in former times man's life had been one of toil and hardship. It is correct to say, therefore, that modern civilization and the progress of science have greatly improved man's life and have brought comfort and ease in their trail.

Haile Selassie

#49. Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

Aldous Huxley

#50. It's progress I think, that science has joined philosophy, metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#51. Science progresses not because scientists as a whole are passionately open-minded but because different scientists are passionately closed-minded about different things.

Henry H. Bauer

#52. Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.
Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Johannes Kepler

#53. What I do is very theoretical. It won't necessarily have implications for anything anyone is doing tomorrow, yet you know that there's a sense of progress in science, and as we understand more, it just turns out that, somehow, the world evolves with us.

Lisa Randall

#54. The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#55. Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know - the Church does neither.

Robert G. Ingersoll

#56. Science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.

Joan Robinson

#57. Reduction is at the heart of progress in science.

Jon Elster

#58. Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

Lisa Randall

#59. Desire is the motivating force behind all progress and advancement in science, art, industry and in all phases of life.

Joseph Murphy

#60. The responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress.

Rachel Carson

#61. Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.

Vannevar Bush

#62. It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

J. Craig Venter

#63. It is a most gratifying sign of the rapid progress of our time that our best text-books become antiquated so quickly.

Theodor Billroth

#64. Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

Michael J. Fox

#65. I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

Ogden Nash

#66. But now I've got a young son and his interest is in science and now when I talk to him, I see that in the science sphere of our lives there is new, there is progress.

Janet Suzman

#67. Mass application of technological innovations, which constitutes much of the distinctive substance of modern economic growth, is closely connected with the further progress of science, in its turn the basis for additional advance in technology.

Simon Kuznets

#68. To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction.

Nikola Tesla

#69. [T]he history of science has proved that fundamental research is the lifeblood of individual progress and that the ideas that lead to spectacular advances spring from it.

Edward Victor Appleton

#70. And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

Chauncey Wright

#71. There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.

Bram Stoker

#72. Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity ... The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable.

Georges Lemaitre

#73. The problem is not religion or God. The actual problem is authoritarianism, mixed with the desire to angrily impose one's personal apparently idealistic beliefs on others.

Abhijit Naskar

#74. Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging.

Martin Chalfie

#75. Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

James Grant

#76. The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Gaston Bachelard

#77. Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#78. We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did.

Paul Nitze

#79. The more progress physical sciences make, the more they tend to enter the domain of mathematics, which is a kind of centre to which they all converge. We may even judge the degree of perfection to which a science has arrived by the facility with which it may be submitted to calculation.

Adolphe Quetelet

#80. Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

Paul Karl Feyerabend

#81. One of the lessons I have learned in the different stages of my career is that science is not done alone. It is through talking with others and sharing that progress is made.

Carol W. Greider

#82. When we consider the magnitude and extent of his discoveries and their influence on the progress of science and of industry, there is no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time.

Ernest Rutherford

#83. The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.

John Polkinghorne

#84. Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to [money management]; for ... want of attention to pecuniary matters ... has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.

William Cobbett

#85. No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

Sigmund Freud

#86. Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

Loren Eiseley

#87. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

James Madison

#88. I think it's not particularly necessary to lead a religious life. People progress just as well in music, or art, or math or science or gardening or whatever. It all seems to work as well and the process is good.

Jim Henson

#89. Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.

Max Planck

#90. I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

Peter Thiel

#91. Scientific achievements seem evanescent, because the very progress of science causes their supersedure; yet some of them are of so fundamental a nature that they are immortal in a deeper way.

George Sarton

#92. The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Benjamin Disraeli

#93. Science can give mankind a better standard of living, better health and a better mental life, if mankind in turn gives science the sympathy and support so essential to its progress.

Vannevar Bush

#94. Truth or dare ... truth ain't fair.
Marshal Robert Quantrell - Belle Starr: Dead Man's Hand (work in progress)

Belinda McBride

#95. All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

Matthew Arnold

#96. The sound of progress is perhaps the sound of plummeting hypotheses.

Peter Haggett

#97. Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and obldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?

Sinclair Lewis

#98. We do not know how to formulate string theory nor do we know its underlying principles. Surprisingly, this fact does not stop us from making progress.

Nathan Seiberg

#99. Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Bertrand Russell

#100. Progress of the human society is predicated upon the proper functioning of a key element of the human mind, that is reasoning.

Abhijit Naskar