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Science Quotes
"Nowhere in this country should we have laws that permit drinking and driving or drinking in vehicles that are on American highways. This is not rocket science. We know how to prevent this, and 36 states do."
36
"Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them."
35
"Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe."
34
"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science."
34
"Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science."
34
"Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection."
34
"Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood."
34
"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."
32
"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
32
"I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of."
32
"The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development."
31
"Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements."
31
"A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible."
31
"Can there be a completely different set of laws of physics in a different universe, or do the laws of physics as we understand them hold true in all possible universes? If the answer is that a different set of laws can operate in a different universe system, this would suggest (from a Buddhist perspective) that even the laws of physics are entangled with the karma of the sentient beings that will arise in that universe."
30
"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
30
"I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android."
30
"I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it."
29
"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
29
"The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."
29
"The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general."
29
"One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity."
29
"Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense."
29
"It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not."
29
"I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go."
29
"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
28
"I do not think we are ever going to be able to, for a long time, get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools, especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology."
28
"The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will."
28
"The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it."
28
"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction."
28
"Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can strike with a fury that no human edifice could withstand. Even for those who have learned to live with it, it is an often murderous substance. We call it water."
28
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