Quotes About Science

One price of demystifying the universe is that science, unlike religion, asks only how, not why. As to the purpose of things, science is silent. But if science cannot talk about meaning, it can talk about harmony.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

Thus, although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the solid globe.

The present is the key to the past

Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed, or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science .

I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz , that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.

Geology is intimately related to almost all the physical sciences, as history is to the moral. An

I proved to you that psychiatry is an exact science!" "An exact science?!" "Yes, you owe me exactly one hundred and forty-three dollars!

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it.

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower—even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system—that I forgot to simply water it.

More important: Unless you're in the hard sciences, the process of writing is your most valuable single tool for developing better ideas. The process of writing is the dominant source of intellectual creativity.

Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have knocked over and spilled on everything.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to the standards of that context, any scientific theory is turned into mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample.

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional.

Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.

Pregnancy is associated with an increase in total body oxygen consumption of approximately 50 mL O2/minute, which is 20% greater than nonpregnant levels.

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—the mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness.