Famous Quotes & Sayings

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 Jon Williams

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

Voltaire

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.

Walter Russell

Science has great skills, great reasoning and great intelligence in combining effects. It knows HOW to do many things but it admittedly does not know the WHY of anything.

Winston Churchill

It may be that ... when the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else nobody will want to kill anyone at all. [Referring to the hydrogen bomb.]

Winston Churchill

Science bestowed immense new powers on man, and at the same time, created conditions which were largely beyond his comprehension.

Winston Churchill

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Winston Churchill

These, Gentlemen, are the opinions upon which I base my facts.

Winston Churchill

Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.

William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

Woodrow Wilson

Sciencehas won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a freedom touse nature as a familiar servant; but it has not freed us from ourselves.

Xenophanes

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

Xenophanes

For we are all sprung from earth and water

Xenophanes

Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking, mortals discover what is better.

Winston Churchill

This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.

William Temple

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

Will Rogers

With old inflation riding the headlines, I have read till I am bleary-eyed, and I can't get head from tails of the whole thing. ... Now we are living in an age of explanations-and plenty of 'em, too-but no two things that's been done to us have been explained twice the same way, by even the same man. It's and age of in one ear and out the other.

Zhuangzi

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

William Harvey

It is, however, an argument of no weight to say that natural bodies are first generated or compounded out of those things into which they are at the last broken down or dissolved.

William Hazlitt

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

Wendell Willkie

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

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