Science Quotes

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Sir Arthur Eddington, Attributed in Robert L. Weber "More Random Walks in Science", 1982

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters.

B. F. Skinne

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Origen

Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - The dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer - Lytton

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Bertrand Russell

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Robert K. Merton

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford, in J. B. Birks "Rutherford at Manchester" (1962)

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Professor Edsger Dijkstra

Science is organized knowledge.

Herbert Spence

Humor the sons of the poor, for they give science its splendor.

The Talmud

Science is facts just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Henri Poincare

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over - Except when they are different.

Nancy Banks - Smith

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

M. C. Escher, Quoted in To Infinity and Beyond, E Maor (Princeton 1991)

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Doug Larson

There are in fact two things, science and opinion the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

Rebecca West

Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance the more we feel how much remains unknown.

Humphrey Davy

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

Charles Lindbergh, Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper (letter to the editor)

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Louis Pasteu

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Oscar Wilde

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

George Sewell

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Isaac Asimov

Engineering is the science of economy, of conserving the energy, kinetic and potential, provided and stored up by nature for the use of man. It is the business of engineering to utilize this energy to the best advantage, so that there may be the least possible waste.

William A. Smith, 1908

Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

Logan Pearsall Smith

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

Sir Francis Darwin, Eugenics Review, April 1914

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Robert G. Ingersoll

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

H. L. Mencken

Justice requires that to lawfully constituted Authority there be given that respect and obedience which is its due; that the laws which are made shall be in wise conformity with the common good; and that, as a matter of conscience all men shall render obedience to these laws.

Pope Pius XI

Living with a conscience is like driving a car with the brakes on.

Budd Schulberg

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Louis Pasteu

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Karl Barth

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Arthur C. Clarke

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

William E. Channing

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

George Washington

Freedom is a clear conscience.

Periande