Famous Quotes & Sayings

Stephen Leacock

Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

Soren Kierkegaard

In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

Stephen Wolfram

The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

Stephen Wolfram

...All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

Marcus Aurelius

The man who doesn't know what the universe is doesn't know where he lives.

Thomas A. Edison

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.

Thomas A. Edison

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.

Thomas Aquinas

It must be understood that prime matter, and form as well, is neither generated nor corrupted, because every generation is from something to something. Now that from which generation proceeds is matter, and that to which it proceeds is form. So that, if matter or form were generated, there would be a matter for matter and a form for form, endlessly. Whence, there is generation only of the composite, properly speaking.

Talcott Parsons

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

Robert Andrews Millikan

There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom

Robert Andrews Millikan

The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of awarding the the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1923. Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both-by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Two erroneous impressions ... seem to be current among certain groups of uninformed persons. The first is that religion today stands for mediaeval theology; the second that science is materialistic and irreligious.

Robert A. Heinlein

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Robert A. Heinlein

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

Robert A. Heinlein

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

Steven Wright

I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost.

Steven Spielberg

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.

Robert Boyle

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

Tom Stoppard

There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!

Tom Stoppard

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

Tom Hanks

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

Sam Ervin

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Tacitus

The sciences throw an inexpressible grace over our compositions, even where they are not immediately concerned; as their effects are discernible where we least expect to find them.

Tom Robbins

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Tom Robbins

The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.

Thomas Carlyle

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.

Thomas Carlyle

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.

Thomas Carlyle

There is something in man which your science cannot satisfy.

Thomas Carlyle

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Thomas Carlyle

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

Thomas Carlyle

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

Stephen Hawking

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

Stephen Hawking

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.