Quotes on Science

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

Anyone who's promoting the exact diet that they were in previous years probably isn't keeping up with the latest science, though in general, the balance of evidence has remained remarkably consistent - centering one's diet around whole plant foods.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

And as for other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,-sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! This contributed to the passing of the Pure Food Act of 1906.

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances.

Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.

In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.

But I don't see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

Who, of men, can tell_x000D_ _x000D_ That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell_x000D_ _x000D_ To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,_x000D_ _x000D_ The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,_x000D_ _x000D_ The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,_x000D_ _x000D_ The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,_x000D_ _x000D_ Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,_x000D_ _x000D_ If human souls did never kiss and greet?

It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars.