Famous Quotes & Sayings

Francis Bacon

Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.

Florence Nightingale

Averages ... seduce us away from minute observation.

Fletcher Knebel

It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Herbert Hoover

Engineering without imagination sinks to a trade.

Henri Frederic Amiel

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it...

Henri Frederic Amiel

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Janna Levin

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

Ernst Mach

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Ernst Mach

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Ernst Mayr

It is curious how often erroneous theories have had a beneficial effect for particular branches of science.

Ernst Mayr

Two forms or species are sympatric, if they occur together, that is if their areas of distribution overlap or coincide. Two forms (or species) are allapatric, if they do not occur together, that is if they exclude each other geographically. The term allopatric is primarily useful in denoting geographic representatives.

Ernest Rutherford

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

Ernest Rutherford

Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.

Ernest Rutherford

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

Ernest Rutherford

All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.

I want to do science fiction with dark stories.

Murray Gell-Mann

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. The beauty of the basic laws of natural science, as revealed in the study of particles and of the cosmos, is allied to the litheness of a merganser diving in a pure Swedish lake, or the grace of a dolphin leaving shining trails at night in the Gulf of California.

Harry Shearer

I was a Political Science major.

Fred Hoyle

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Fred Hoyle

A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Fred Hoyle

Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

Fred Hoyle

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

Frank Herbert

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

George Henry Lewes

Science is not addressed to poets.

George Henry Lewes

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

George Henry Lewes

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

George Henry Lewes

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Graham Parker

Sadly, my socks are like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike.