Famous Quotes & Sayings

Harold E. Varmus

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

Ivan Pavlov

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.

H. G. Wells

Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

H. G. Wells

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

H. G. Wells

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

H. L. Mencken

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

H. L. Mencken

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

H. L. Mencken

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

Guglielmo Marconi

In the new era, thought itself will be transmitted by radio.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.

Gertrude Stein

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Ian Hacking

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

Ian Hacking

Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

James D. Watson

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

James D. Watson

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

James D. Watson

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.