Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louis Pasteur

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Louis Pasteur

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

Louis Pasteur

Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries

Lord Byron

What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets, ...

John Charles Polanyi

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.

John Charles Polanyi

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.

John Charles Polanyi

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.

John Arbuthnot

John looked ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter.

John Archibald Wheeler

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

John Archibald Wheeler

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

Matthew Arnold

The highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent in science; and we have Newton. Shakspeare [sic] and Newton: in the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority, prescription and routine, the fullest room to expand as it will.

Max Weber

Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.

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.

Richard Dawkins

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Richard Dawkins

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

Russell Baker

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day...

Ronald Ross

The Panama Canal was dug with a microscope.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

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.