Science Quotes

I hear you jeering. Pfui. Those of you who know my work only from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE may not be aware that I was once considered the most romantic science fiction writer of the 70s, back when I was doing my Thousand Worlds stuff.

George R. R. Martin

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

Charles Lamb

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Imre Lakatos

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Erwin Chargaff

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature.

Nick Hornby

I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.

Cory Doctorow

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

Paul Davies

The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.

Jeremy Rifkin

Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.

Toba Beta

Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story.

John Polkinghorne

The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination.

Homer W. Smith

To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority.

Morris Raphael Cohen

Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.

Fritjof Capra

The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.

Paul Karl Feyerabend

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

Freeman John Dyson

It is disappointing and embarrassing to the science profession that some Nobel Laureates would deliberately use their well deserved scientific reputations and hold themselves out as experts in other fields.

David Douglass

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

Gregory Benford

Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing.

Alvaro De Rujula

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

Albert Einstein

Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

Albert Einstein