Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Carl Sagan

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Carl Sagan

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

Carl Sagan

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

Carl Sagan

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Carl Sagan

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science

Bela Bartok

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.

Bede Griffiths

The one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.

B. R. Ambedkar

Learn to live in this world with self-respect

B. H. Liddell Hart

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.

B. F. Skinner

I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!

B. F. Skinner

A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.

Billy Corgan

I've rarely done anything that's overtly self-destructive without consciously knowing what I'm doing. And then of course, the astute journalist jumps forward and says, "Why are you being calculated?" Calculated seems to assume a sinister intent. My intent is always for artistic effect.

Bill Crawford

To understand ourself, we must understand our "selves," or the parts of us that motivate our thoughts, decisions, and behaviors.

Bill Crawford

The key to self-confidence is knowing that you would choose you... and why. In this way the chosen becomes the chooser, and love versus fear becomes the energy of choice.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

Mary Callahan Erdoes

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

William Booth

If any of them that come through the program are having trouble in math, I'll tutor them. (Teaching) is the most important thing I do.

Alvin E. Roth

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

Clive Granger

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

Richard Bach

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

Todd Berrier

With 43 teams here, you do the math.

Bill Gates

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.

David Chalmers

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.