Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
Interpretation
Science alone cannot determine our moral values or ethics.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell suggests that while science provides us with knowledge about the world, it does not offer guidance on ethical principles or moral behavior. Ethics, which dictate how we should act and what is right or wrong, require insights beyond scientific reasoning, drawing upon philosophy, culture, and individual beliefs.
In practice
In a debate on the role of science in society, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for a moral framework.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.
The noblest contribution which any man can make for the benefit of posterity, is that of character. The richest bequest which any man can leave to the youth of his native land, is that of a shining, spotless example.
The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.
We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.
It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us.
Besides the respect of the lives of human beings, all the animals and plants should be on the list too. That is the real humanitarianism.
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