Famous Quotes & Sayings

Wernher von Braun

The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.

Wernher von Braun

It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.

Wernher von Braun

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.

Wernher von Braun

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.

Werner Heisenberg

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.

Werner Heisenberg

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.

Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Werner Heisenberg

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Samuel Butler

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.

Samuel Horsley

The sciences are said, and they are truly said, to have a mutual connection, that any one of them may be the better understood, for an insight into the rest.

Samuel Beckett

Mysterious affair, electricity.

W. H. Auden

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

W. H. Auden

Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

William Cobbett

Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to [money management]; for. ... want of attention to pecuniary matters ... has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.

William Congreve

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

William Cowper

To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine. ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field.

William Cowper

Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn, That he who made it, and reveal'd its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

William Godwin

Whenever truth stands in the mind unaccompanied by the evidence upon which it depends, it cannot properly be said to be apprehended at all.

Warren Weaver

Science is not gadgetry.

Thomas Hobbes

The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of Names or Appellations, and their Connexion; whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutuall utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Commonwealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves.

Thomas Hobbes

And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.

Thomas Hobbes

Whatsoever accidents Or qualities our sense make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object.

Thomas Hobbes

To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.

Thomas Hobbes

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Tim Berners-Lee

WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project

Thomas Love Peacock

They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

Thomas Kuhn

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

Thomas Kuhn

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

Thomas Kuhn

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.