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Quotes by Scientist
"Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease."
19
"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."
19
"What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them."
19
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
19
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
19
"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."
19
"To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong."
19
"I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my high appreciation of the honour extended to me many years ago by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science by enrolling me amongst its members."
19
"If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business, if there was any competition."
19
"I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign."
19
"Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds."
19
"Base stealing, like crime in general, is increasing and is also getting more difficult to curb."
19
"The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination."
19
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus which is the business of politics. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
19
"Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs."
18
"There are no arbitrary constants ... nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory)."
18
"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries."
18
"Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another, it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program."
18
"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."
18
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
18
"I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic."
18
"The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war."
18
"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."
18
"Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation."
18
"For any question " regardless of its complexity " there is a clear andsimple answer."
18
"The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally."
18
"One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all.Now, I am aware of only two means of establishing equality in the world of politics: rights have to be granted to every citizen or to none."
18
"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
18
"Observation: I can't see a thing.Conclusion: Dinosaurs."
18
"For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, 'We came in peace for all Mankind.' As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."
18
"Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts."
18
"Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier."
18
"Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war."
18
"In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships."
18
"When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum."
18
"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
18
"Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex."
18
"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them."
18
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."
18
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