Quotes About Science

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica

The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

CSF used to be called "gin-clear" when there was no blood or infection in it,' I say to Jeff. 'But probably we're now supposed to use alcohol-free terminology.' I

My 'I', my conscious self, writing these words, does not feel like electrochemistry, but that is what it is.

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet

It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the "given-world" of the scientist and the "made-world" of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art.

Dad," he said, "how far away is the sun?" "Five thousand miles," his father said.

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.

Pedantry iz the science ov investing what little yu know in one kind ov perfumery, and insisting upon sticking that under every man's knose whom you meet.

True science knows that man invents nothing, but merely finds out what God has invented.

Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?

Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.

The only real science is the knowledge of how a person should live his life. And this knowledge is open to everyone.

Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

I want to enrich medical science with a new term: Arbeitskur.

They asked a Chinese man, "What is science?" He said, "Science is knowing people." Then they asked, "And what is virtue?" He answered, "Virtue is loving people.

The objection that the doctrine of Jesus is excellent but impracticable, comes not only from believers, but from sceptics, from those who do not believe, or think that they do not believe, in the dogmas of the fall of man and the redemption; from men of science and philosophers who consider themselves free from all prejudice. They believe, or imagine that they believe, in nothing, and so consider themselves as above such a superstition as the dogma of the fall and the redemption.

The presence of the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is felt at every step of history. All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a solution of that question. If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.

Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went on as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.

The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.