Quotes About Progress

Science conducts us, step by step, through the whole range of creation, until we arrive, at length, at God.

Preachers dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

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

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

The most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

...They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

There are no limits to what science can explore.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.

Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction.

Speculations apparently the most unprofitable have almost invariably been those from which the greatest practical applications have emanated.

The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.