Quotes on Science

Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.

Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.

Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

There are several places in Vietnam where they're teaching computer science from second grade in class, so they don't have a gender divide because everybody is expected to program.

The McCarthy period came along...and many of the other scientists who had been working on these same lines gave up. Probably saying "Why should I sacrifice myself? I am a scientist, I am supposed to be working on scientific things, so I don't need to put myself at risk by talking about these possibilities." And I have said that perhaps I'm just stubborn... I have said "I don't like anybody to tell me what to do or to think, except Mrs. Pauling."

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.

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.

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.

A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.