Quotes About Science

John C. Polkinghorne

Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

Medical physics is an applied area of physics.

I am now almost certain that we need more radiation for better health.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.

Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.

The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.

Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.

It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.

Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

Young people ask me if this country is serious about science. They aren't thinking about the passport that they will hold, but the country that they must rely on for support and encouragement.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

While Money's theory of human newborns as total psychosexual blank slates may strike a contemporary reader as science fiction, such was not the case in the mid-1950s, when it was met with almost universal acceptance by clinicians and scientists

Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.

Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

We have never explained the numerical value of any of the constants of Nature.