Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert M. Pirsig

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

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.

Woody Allen

Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

William Whewell

Astronomy is ... the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.

William Whewell

To discover the laws of operative power in material productions, whether formed by man or brought into being by Nature herself, is the work of a science, and is indeed what we more especially term Science.

William Whewell

The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

William James

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

William James

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

William James

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.

William James

Man lives for science as well as bread.

William James

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

William James

Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.

William James

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

William James

...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

William James

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

William James

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

William Gilbert

The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.

William Faulkner

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Ronald Reagan

[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

Saint Augustine

Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

Xenophanes

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