Famous Quotes & Sayings

Martin Heidegger

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

Mario Puzo

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Mary McCarthy

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mark Twain

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

Mark Twain

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Mark Twain

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Mary Wortley Montagu

A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.

Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Marshall McLuhan

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Marshall McLuhan

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

Michel de Montaigne

It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.

Francois Rabelais

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.

Christine O'Donnell

There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put-that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory.

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.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

...while science gives us implements to use, science alone does not determine for what ends they will be employed. Radio is an amazing invention. Yet now that it is here, one suspects that Hitler never could have consolidated his totalitarian control over Germany without its use. One never can tell what hands will reach out to lay hold on scientific gifts, or to what employment they will be put. Ever the old barbarian emerges, destructively using the new civilization.

Frances Wright

The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science.

Fran Lebowitz

modern science was largely conceived of as an answer to the servant problem and ... it is generally practiced by those who lack a flair for conversation.

George Wald

[Attributing the origin of life to spontaneous generation.] However improbable we regard this event, it will almost certainly happen at least once.... The time... is of the order of two billion years.... Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

George Wald

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

George Wald

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

George Santayana

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

George Orwell

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

G. H. Hardy

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

G. H. Hardy

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).

G. H. Hardy

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

G. H. Hardy

I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance; there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

G. H. Hardy

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

G. H. Hardy

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.

G. H. Hardy

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.