Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Johnson

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

Samuel Johnson

Hoc age ['do this'] is the great rule, whether you are serious or merry; whether ... learning science or duty from a folio, or floating on the Thames. Intentions must be gathered from acts.

Samuel Johnson

Round numbers are always false.

Samuel Johnson

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Ronald Reagan

I am not a scientist.

Ronald Reagan

Education is like a diamond with many facets: It includes the basic mastery of numbers and letters that give us access to the treasury of human knowledge, accumulated and refined through the ages; it includes technical and vocational training as well as instruction in science, higher mathematics, and humane letters.

Robertson Davies

But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

Robertson Davies

Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.

Robertson Davies

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

William Herschel

... finding that in [the Moon] there is a provision of light and heat; also in appearance, a soil proper for habitation fully as good as ours, if not perhaps better who can say that it is not extremely probable, nay beyond doubt, that there must be inhabitants on the Moon of some kind or other?

William Herschel

The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds.

William Herschel

We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.

William Herschel

He broke through the barriers of the skies.

William Herschel

I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.

Walter Chrysler

It devolves upon the United States to help motorize the world.

Walter Bagehot

The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.

William Blake

Execution is the chariot of genius.

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.