Famous Quotes & Sayings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As soon as any one belongs to a narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We see only what we know.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything in science depends on what one calls an aperçu, on becoming aware of what is at the bottom of the phenomena. Such becoming aware is infinitely fertile.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

John Harvey Kellogg

Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco, in its various forms, is one of the most mischievous of all drugs. There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco. Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the evil effects which they produce; but tobacco has not a single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return.

John Harvey Kellogg

All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco has not yet been fully tried before the bar of science. But the tribunal has been prepared and the gathering of evidence has begun and when the final verdict is rendered, it will appear that tobacco is evil and only evil; that as a drug it is far more deadly than alcohol, killing in a dose a thousand times smaller, and that it does not possess a single one of the quasi merits of alcohol.

John Henry Newman

To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.

John Henry Newman

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.

Ayn Rand

We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

Bertrand Russell

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.

Bertrand Russell

Scientific method, although in its more refined forms it may seem complicated, is in essence remarkably simply. It consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question. The two stages, first of observation, and second of inference to a law, are both essential, and each is susceptible of almost indefinite refinement. (1931)

Bertrand Russell

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Bertrand Russell

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

Bertrand Russell

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Bertrand Russell

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Bertrand Russell

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Bertrand Russell

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Benjamin Disraeli

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

Benjamin Disraeli

A nation has a fixed quantity of invention, and it will make itself felt.

Edgar Allan Poe

... -ev'n with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joy...

Edgar Allan Poe

A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

Elbert Hubbard

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

In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

Edsger Dijkstra

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Science is great, but it's got to be translational into a viable product.

Janna Levin

Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.