Top 100 Science Scientists Quotes
#1. Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.
John Polanyi
#2. I happen to love science ... Scientists are all slightly mad. There is truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist. They are mad with curiosity.
Richard Preston
#4. Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#5. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.
Frank Herbert
#6. Magic is magic as long as humans can explain it logically!
Asse Sauga
#7. There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.
Linus Pauling
#8. That's another pitfall of reductionism: Until scientists have the means to isolate and measure things, they insist those things don't and can't exist, and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant an superstitious.
T. Colin Campbell
#9. The Church does not pretend to be scientists. It teaches based upon what science tells it.
Wellington Mara
#10. For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.
Rebecca Skloot
#11. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.
Steven Weinberg
#12. Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
Carl Sagan
#13. You frighten a lot of scientists. If they say that climate is not changing, they lose their research grants. And some people cannot afford that; they become silent, or a few of us speak up, because we think that it's for the honesty of science, that we have to do it.
Nils-Axel Morner
#14. Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
Michael Crichton
#15. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them.
Mark Twain
#16. I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble.
Bill Nye
#17. Some of the FDA's own scientists have charged that politics, not science, is behind the FDA's actions.
Joseph Crowley
#18. The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
Robert M. Pirsig
#19. But it appeared that the motivation for the project was a newspaper article titled 'Research Proves Kids Need a Mom and a Dad.' Someone had written the word 'crap' in red beside the article. It was an excellent start. Scientists need to cultivate a suspicious attitude to research.
Graeme Simsion
#20. That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis
an idea
and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?
Esther Hicks
#21. The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas - your own and those offered by others ... .
Frederick Seitz
#22. Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.
Martin Rees
#23. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have "misled science into a dead end," the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin's paper, "we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.
David Berlinski
#24. We must remember that science is a way of using empirical evidence to better understand our world. We are all scientists, just many of us are not very good ones. However, we are all capable of exercising our intellects in a purposeful, linear pursuit of knowledge.
Chris Matakas
#25. 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
#26. The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Jacob Bronowski
#27. 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
#28. A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.
P.M.S. Blackett
#29. If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.
E. O. Wilson
#30. I don't do metaphysics. Neither do I have the luxury to talk about my beliefs.
Abhijit Naskar
#31. Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined, hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension.
Robert A. Baker
#32. Scientists ofttimes have the greatest faith in a higher power. The more they dig into, establish facts and figures, the more they marvel about the mystery of it all.
Malcolm Forbes
#33. Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.
Orson Scott Card
#34. I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
Paul Krugman
#35. (Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians ... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies ... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#36. The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried
Richard Dawkins
#37. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.
Isaac Asimov
#38. So part of the job of philosophy of science is to question assumptions that scientists take for granted.
Samir Okasha
#39. 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
#40. I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#41. We are in the ordinary position of scientists of having to be content with piecemeal improvements: we can make several things clearer, but we cannot make anything clear.
Frank P. Ramsey
#42. Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
Brian W. Aldiss
#43. The scientists must be crazy themselves if they think they can explain this crazy world.
Marty Rubin
#44. Before the first atomic bomb test, scientists took the time to calculate whether the blast would ignite the nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere and incinerate us all. The risk was low and the test went off, but Rees wonders what the odds would have had to be to discourage the bomb makers.
Dennis Overbye
#45. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Walter Darby Bannard
#46. Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.
Simone Weil
#47. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#48. 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
#49. Science cannot stop while ethics catches up ... and nobody should expect scientists to do all the thinking for the country.
Elvin C. Stakman
#50. In the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
Arthur Koestler
#51. Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik
#52. Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#53. Science isn't just for scientists and guys in lab coats. It's something that everybody can do.
Jamie Hyneman
#54. This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions; journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.
Christopher Essex
#55. Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.
Sam Kean
#56. It is cheaper to pay mathematicians and computer scientists to design algorithms that will eliminate webspamming, rather than to pay lawyers to do lawsuits.
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#57. I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
Alastair Reynolds
#59. Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.
Stephen Jay Gould
#60. For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile.
E.L. Konigsburg
#61. On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth
Carl Sagan
#62. Admittedly, the body of scientists, as a whole, does uphold the authority of science over the lay public. It controls thereby also the process by which young men are trained to become members of the scientific profession.
Michael Polanyi
#63. Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#64. In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it.
Stuart Firestein
#65. Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
Richard Feynman
#66. Scientists know more and more and so science advances. Artists know less and less and so art advances.
Marty Rubin
#67. Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.
Stan Goff
#68. Scientists are usually nice, organized, logical people who are very cooperative. I always learn a lot of science while shooting science stories and it helps to be able to speak intelligently to a subject about his or her field of work, i.e., do your homework before the photography.
Peter Menzel
#69. The complete Apollo team...directly involves slightly over 400,000 people...Included are some if the country's foremost scientists and engineers. This mobilization of men and resources is unprecedented in history since WWII
Martha Lemasters
#70. The soul is a mystery. Scientists and Theologians constantly butt heads on the soul's definitive and can't come to grips with its purpose and actual existence. Yet, the basic framework taught in a High School physics class helps with an explanation of the latter - the existence of the soul.
H.D. Rennerfeldt
#71. That there is an evolution of one sort or another is now common ground among scientists. Whether or not that evolution is directed is another question.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#72. We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.
Albert Einstein
#73. The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.
A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.
Sune Bergstrom
#74. Scientists have a second brain where other people have their hearts.
Martha Albrand
#75. Science is international: the best scientists can come from anywhere; they can come from next door, or they can come from a small village in a country anywhere in the world - we need to make it easier.
John O'Keefe
#76. Scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others; it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#77. 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
#78. For years, computer scientists were treating operating systems design as sort of an open-reserch issue, when the field's direction had been decided by commercial operations. Computer science has become completely cut off from reality.
David Gelernter
#79. It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Henrik Ibsen
#80. The manufactured consensus of the IPCC has had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public's trust in the IPCC.
Judith Curry
#81. Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent.
Donella Meadows
#82. If networked science is to reach its potential, scientists will have to embrace and reward the open sharing of all forms of scientific knowledge, not just traditional journal publication. Networked science must be open science.
Michael Nielsen
#83. In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life ... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.
Michael Behe
#84. Informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#85. Eww, he said. I almost said the same thing, but unlike my brother, I had been annealed in the furnace of Scientific Thought. Scientists do not say such things aloud (although we may think them from time to time).
Jacqueline Kelly
#86. The Feynman quip is not without a philosopher's tu quoque: "most scientists tend to understand little more about science than fish about hydrodynamics" (Lakatos 1978:62 n.2).
Robert Nola
#87. Dogbert: Scientists have discovered the gene that makes some people love golf.
Dilbert: How can they tell it's the golf gene?
Dogbert: It's plaid and it lies.
Scott Adams
#88. Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Robert Graves
#89. One of the reasons I like working with schools is to try to convince women that they can be scientists and that science can be fun.
Nancy Roman
#90. How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.
Terry Pratchett
#91. We didn't set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don't purport that what we do is real science but we're demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.
Adam Savage
#92. Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.
Abhijit Naskar
#93. 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
#94. [Scientists] have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it however it may jar against their inclinations.
Thomas Huxley
#95. Science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.
Science says that eminent scientists can not destroy the religion because of it is outcome from religious spirit.
Science
#96. Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural
Anne Fausto-Sterling
#97. People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.
Lisa Randall
#98. The pathetic thing about it is that many scientists are trying to prove the doctrine of evolution, which no science can do.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#99. Like the pioneering Muslim scientists, Al Bukhari insisted on an empirical, organized method in the science of fiqh and hadith
Firas Alkhateeb
#100. ... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
