Famous Quotes & Sayings

Isaac Newton

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Guy Kawasaki

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

James Gleick

I really don't think of myself as a science writer.

J. G. Ballard

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Ivar Giaever

Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

Don Adams

It's kind of like a science fair. They talk about their projects.

John Charles Polanyi

It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.

Logan Pearsall Smith

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.

John F. Kennedy

As science, of necessity, becomes more involved with itself, so also, of necessity, it becomes more international. I am impressed to know that of the 670 members of this Academy

John F. Kennedy

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

Jonas Salk

IT IS SAID TO AWAIT CERTAINTY IS TO AWAIT ETERNITY.

Jonas Salk

The people - could you patent the sun ?

Jonas Salk

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

Joyce Carol Oates

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Ovid

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Paul Valery

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Pope John Paul II

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Pierre de Fermat

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.

Pierre Charron

The true science and study of mankind is man.

Peter Medawar

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Peter Medawar

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

Peter Medawar

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Peter Medawar

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

Peter Medawar

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

Peter Medawar

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

Peter Medawar

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

Peter Medawar

You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

Peter Medawar

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Peter Medawar

Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be "interesting." ... The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is-whether to science generally or to mankind.

Peter Medawar

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

Peter Abelard

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.