Top 100 Scientific Quotes
#1. The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
Michael Finkel
#2. Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#3. The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt.
Gary Taubes
#4. Learn to attack things frontally but according to the most scientific methods.
Ernest Dimnet
#5. I promptly fell in love with scientific research and soon had assigned myself, as a major vocation, the task of elucidating the mechanism of action of the antidiabetic hormone.
Christian De Duve
#6. Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications
systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.
Fritjof Capra
#8. For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.
Stanislaw Lem
#9. It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.
John C. Lennox
#10. That's the beauty of the famous scientific method. You observe your subject, ask questions, and then research before establishing a hypothesis.
Claudia Burgoa
#11. I think that for the highest achievements nowadays ... need to have the stable as a rock scientific base. And also need to own modesty.
Alexander Alekhine
#12. You don't want to come out with anything that's wrong, of course, in a scientific, you know, a major scientific announcement, and so you're being so careful trying to check, well maybe it's this, maybe it's that, you're looking at every possible thing.
Saul Perlmutter
#13. There is a deep connection between technical, scientific, and artistic creativity.
Barbara Oakley
#14. Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
Sam Harris
#15. When the disaster began to hit the wealthy as well, the "modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism" (Haines) suddenly became proofs of the evils of statism and socialism - another quick transition that takes place when needed. To
Noam Chomsky
#17. Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.
Carl Sagan
#18. Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.
John Maynard Smith
#19. My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.
Hilary Kornblith
#20. Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.
Alfred L. Kroeber
#21. If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus
more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
Thomas Sowell
#22. Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'
Isidor Isaac Rabi
#23. Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.
David Hilbert
#24. The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.
Paul Greene
#25. The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it ... If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.
Edward O. Wilson
#26. It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering - only expensive - blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.
Nikola Tesla
#27. I lay no claim to advancing scientific data other than advancing flying knowledge. I can only say that I do it because I want to.
Amelia Earhart
#28. It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences.
George Trumbull Ladd
#29. Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.
Richard M. Weaver
#30. Given that the 'common sense' of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between the manifest image and an out of date scientific image.11
James Ladyman
#31. A scientific mindset accepts the truth as a credo.
Eraldo Banovac
#32. What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.
Jean Piaget
#33. War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
Adrienne Rich
#34. Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye
#35. Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Bertrand Russell
#36. An important event in my scientific life has been my appointment as a Professor at the College de France in 1973.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#37. Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future-with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals-have a worse record to show in these sciences than in almost any scientific endeavor.
Hannah Arendt
#38. The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.
Muhammad Iqbal
#39. Whenever known and sufficient causes are available, it is anti-scientific to discard them in favour of a hypothesis that can never be verified.
Max Weber
#40. The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.
Amartya Sen
#41. Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.
Michael Polanyi
#42. The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.
John Dewey
#43. It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.
Clay Shirky
#44. Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
Freeman Dyson
#45. People with a scientific mindset are analytical, open-minded, flexible and have the capacity to answer questions. They are basically focused on what they do not know, and only exceptionally on what they do know.
Eraldo Banovac
#46. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. [Without these one] fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge.
John Dewey
#47. Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me - any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail.
Joseph Murray
#48. The care of a house, the conduct of a home, the management of children, the instruction and government of servants, are as deserving of scientific treatment and scientific professors and lectureships as are the care of farms, the management of manure and crops, and the raising and care of stock.
Catharine Beecher
#49. In 2003 ... the White House conspired with an oil-company funded think tank to block a major government scientific report that sought to spell out the dangers of climate change to Americans.
Joseph J. Romm
#50. I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#51. The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode in which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact.
Thomas Huxley
#52. According to both scientific and anecdotal research, it is clear that homework should be the exception, not the rule. Even the most inventive or meaningful assignments still infringe on the time that belongs to families.
Vicki Abeles
#53. In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.
Joseph Dalton Hooker
#54. Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.
Carlo Rovelli
#55. If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well.
Auguste De Villiers De L'Isle-Adam
#56. One important part of scientific training is that scientists learn the boundaries, the safety issues, how to properly deal with and dispose of chemicals and reagents.
Craig Venter
#57. Tell me, Mrs. Moon, will your need for sustenance trouble you on this excursion? How often do you need to feed? I couldn't tell whether his interest was scientific, or whether he was afraid I might plunge my teeth into his throat at any moment.
J.R. Rain
#58. From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.
Fabiola Gianotti
#59. I am a great believer rather than the popular scientific way of dealing with things that 'Nothing exists unless you can prove it'. I am pretty much the other way that pretty much anything can exist unless you can disprove it.
Anthony Head
#60. Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific.
Joseph Needham
#61. The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
Mark Russell
#62. The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.
Muhammad Iqbal
#63. The physical act of meditating by closing one's eyes and slowing down the speed of internal thoughts - especially worrisome thinking - results in a physiological response that is well documented in the scientific literature.
Tim McCarthy
#64. True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#65. Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'
Max Planck
#66. What the diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.
John W. Dower
#67. Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.
James Gleick
#68. Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.
Henry M. Morris
#69. IBM's long-standing mantra is 'Think.' What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
Ginni Rometty
#70. It turns out that we're not the only ones who go out on a scientific limb as we discuss or attempt to discuss cars, car repairs and scientific education in America today.
Tom Magliozzi
#71. Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible.
Ambrose Bierce
#72. Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits in a lot of different ways.
John L. Phillips
#73. I have also considered many scientific plans during my pushing you around in your pram!
Albert Einstein
#74. There have been too many events in my life, and in the lives of my friends, which have defied any kind of scientific explanation. Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit.
Jane Goodall
#75. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.
George Orwell
#77. Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.
Rodney Stark
#78. The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#79. If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.
Carl Sagan
#80. There is no greater pleasure than having a dog. And that's a scientific fact!
Louis Sabin
#81. The could never have explained Bonaventure anyway because there is no scientific word for miraculous.
Rita Leganski
#82. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.
Rupert Sheldrake
#83. Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Aldous Huxley
#84. The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.
Lewis Thomas
#85. The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#87. It is not knowing, but the love of learning, that characterizes the scientific man.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#88. Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
John Dewey
#89. What to do about climate change is political, it's social, and it's moral, which is one of the reasons the scientific community reached out to the Pope, to ask for his involvement in this issue.
Naomi Oreskes
#90. No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens ... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.
Guy Debord
#91. We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.
Terence McKenna
#92. Animal research has lead to advances in the treatment of many conditions ... Where there is no alternative available, we will continue to ensure that the balance between animal welfare and scientific advancement is maintained.
Andy Burnham
#93. Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
Horace Mann
#94. With its claims to profundity, boldness and originality, thinking still limits itself provisionally to the exclusively rational and scientific ... As soon as it lays hold of the feelings, it becomes spirit.
Robert Musil
#95. Thanks to my fortunate idea of introducing the relativity principle into physics, you (and others) now enormously overrate my scientific abilities, to the point where this makes me quite uncomfortable.
Albert Einstein
#96. What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.
Jacques Derrida
#97. When my 'Scientific American' arrives every month, I read it cover to cover.
Micky Dolenz
#98. Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.
Michael Crichton
#99. If the great story of the last century was the conflict among various political ideologies-communism, fascism and democracy-then the great narrative of this century will be the changes wrought by astonishing scientific breakthroughs
Cynthia Tucker
#100. He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.
Bruce Robinson
