Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things ...

Richard P. Feynman

Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.

Richard P. Feynman

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a straightjacket, which is this: that it has to agree with the known laws of physics. ... It requires imagination to think of what's possible, and then it requires an analysis back, checking to see whether it fits, whether its allowed, according to what's known, okay?

Richard P. Feynman

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Richard P. Feynman

To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill.

Richard P. Feynman

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard P. Feynman

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.

Richard P. Feynman

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe [Nature] does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Dawkins

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Richard Dawkins

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

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...

Thomas Sowell

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Thomas Sowell

Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.

Thomas Sowell

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Thomas Sowell

All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

Robert Kennedy

Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic

Robert Grosseteste

It is not possible for form to do without matter because it is not separable, nor can matter itself be purged of form.

Richard M. Nixon

Listen, I don't know anything about polygraphs and I don't know how accurate they are, but I know they'll scare the hell out of people.

Saul Bellow

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

Robert Sheckley

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

Robert Sheckley

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

Robert Sheckley

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Robert Quillen

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.

Sarah Zettel

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

Sandra Postel

Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.