Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alan Watts

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Dave Barry

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.

Dave Barry

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

David Sarnoff

I ... began my career as a wireless amateur. After 43 years in radio, I do not mind confessing that I am still an amateur. Despite many great achievements in the science of radio and electronics, what we know today is far less than what we have still to learn.

David Sarnoff

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Carl Sagan

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

Carl Sagan

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Carl Sagan

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

Carl Sagan

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

Carl Sagan

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Carl Sagan

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

Carl Sagan

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Carl Sagan

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Carl Sagan

But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

Carl Sagan

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

Carl Sagan

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.

Carl Sagan

The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

Camille Paglia

Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

Camille Paglia

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

Caleb Carr

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

Charles Lamb

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Charles Scott Sherrington

That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only.

Charles Sanders Peirce

The one [the logician] studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other [the mathematician] the science which draws necessary conclusions.

Charles Sanders Peirce

We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Charles M. Schulz

No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

Charles Hermite

Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Charles Henry Parkhurst

Science has not solved difficulties, only shifted the points of difficulty.

Charles Henry Parkhurst

Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end.

Charles Francis Richter

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

Bill Mauldin

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

Nicolas Roeg

There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!

Kurt Vonnegut

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.