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Science Quotes
"The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation."
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"I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you."
54
"Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable."
54
"To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness."
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"The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant."
53
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
53
"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."
53
"Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense."
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"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."
53
"And I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries."
53
"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
53
"There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything."
52
"Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution."
52
"With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts."
51
"Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty."
51
"I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue."
51
"There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end."
51
"Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things."
51
"We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it."
50
"Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time."
50
"There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory."
50
"My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine."
50
"Whether that coherence obtains universally is a question that need not be answered here since only those parts where the coherence has actually been found become part of Science."
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"Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year."
50
"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
50
"Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise."
50
"Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption."
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"Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine."
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"Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature."
50
"I like the scientific spirit-the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine-it always keeps the way beyond open-always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake-after a wrong guess."
50
"It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of."
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"A powerful attraction exists, therefore, to the promotion of a study and of duties of all others engrossing the time most completely, and which is less benefited than most others by any acquaintance with science."
49
"There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study."
49
"My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics."
49
"The President's call for more math and science students is not being heeded by his party's leaders in Congress. They are cutting over $10 billion from student aide while refusing to fully fund No Child Left Behind. Something doesn't add up."
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