Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paul Auster

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

Paul Auster

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Paul Auster

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

Miguel de Unamuno

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

Miguel de Unamuno

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Miguel de Unamuno

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Neil Armstrong

The [Moon] surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.

Neil Armstrong

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.

Naomi Klein

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

Newt Gingrich

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

Noam Chomsky

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

The Earth is the cradle of Humanity. But one doesn't always live in the cradle.

Omar N. Bradley

Our humanity is trapped by moral adolescents. We have too many men of science, too few men of God. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience.

Oliver Goldsmith

All the sciences are, in some measure, linked with each other, and before the one is ended, the other begins.

Oliver Goldsmith

The world is like a vast sea: mankind like a vessel sailing on its tempestuous bosom. ... [T]he sciences serve us for oars.

Oliver Goldsmith

The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Mathematics is an obscure field, an abstruse science, complicated and exact; yet so many have attained perfection in it that we might conclude almost anyone who seriously applied himself would achieve a measure of success.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Aristoteles quidem ait: 'Omnes ingeniosos melancholicos esse.' Aristotle says that all men of genius are melancholy.

Larry Wall

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Oscar Wilde

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

Lucretius

See with what force yon river's crystal stream Resists the weight of many a massy beam. To sink the wood the more we vainly toil, The higher it rebounds, with swift recoil. Yet that the beam would of itself ascend No man will rashly venture to contend. Thus too the flame has weight, though highly rare, Nor mounts but when compelled by heavier air.

Lucretius

Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!

Louis Kronenberger

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Louis Kronenberger

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

Michael Crichton

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

Michael Crichton

Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!

Michael Crichton

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

Michael Crichton

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

Michael Crichton

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Mark Twain

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Mark Twain

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.