Quotes About Ideas

It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.

Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuous development of new concepts.

In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence.

Data-driven statistics has the danger of isolating statistics from the rest of the scientific and mathematical communities by not allowing valuable cross-pollination of ideas from other fields.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

Science, as it reaches the public mind, has both served to discredit and unintentionally reaffirmed mystical ideas.

Innate ideas are in every man, born with him; they are truly himself. The man who says that we have no innate ideas must be a fool and knave, having no conscience or innate science.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.

[An engineer's] invention causes things to come into existence from ideas, makes world conform to thought; whereas science, by deriving ideas from observation, makes thought conform to existence.

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

The inventors of tools enhance civilization, but the author of ideas enables them to invent.

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts