Famous Quotes & Sayings

James D. Watson

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

James D. Watson

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

James D. Watson

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

James Bryce

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.

James Bryant Conant

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.

James Bryant Conant

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

James Bryant Conant

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

James Bryant Conant

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

James Bryant Conant

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Jacques Derrida

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

Jacques Barzun

Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.

Jacques Barzun

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

James Gleick

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

J. William Fulbright

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

Isaac Barrow

An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.

Isaac Asimov

Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny...

Isaac Asimov

A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.

Isaac Asimov

The dangers that face the world can, every one of them, be traced back to science. The salvations that may save the world will, every one of them, be traced back to science.

Isaac Asimov

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Isaac Asimov

Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.

Isaac Asimov

When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

Isaac Asimov

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

Isaac Asimov

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Isaac Asimov

A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

Isaac Asimov

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

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

Immanuel Kant

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

Immanuel Kant

Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.

Immanuel Kant

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

Immanuel Kant

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Georges Cuvier

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

Jean Paul

In science the new is an advance; but in morals, as contradicting our inner ideals and historic idols, it is ever a retrogression.