Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Sam Harris

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

Ronald Graham

Someone has said that all the great jugglers are dead.

Ronald Graham

I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said 'adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough'.

Ronald Graham

AB=(1/4)((A+B)2-(A-B)2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately I have to remind my current students how to prove it.

Ronald Fisher

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence, rather than their occurrence, which becomes highly improbable.

Ronald Fisher

The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.

Ronald Fisher

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Rosa Luxemburg

[Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

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.

Simone Weil

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

Simone Weil

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

Simone Weil

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work ...

Simone Weil

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Simone Weil

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

Simone Weil

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty ...

Thomas Malthus

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

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.

Stephen Hawking

I would rather be right than rigorous.

Stephen Hawking

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Stephen Hawking

One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.