Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,159,190 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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“I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work”
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) first seen 1865 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: letter to T.H. Huxley in 1865
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Economics is not an exact science.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Discovery of the Future," Guest of Honor Speech, 3rd World Science Fiction Convention, Denver, Colorado (4 July 1941)
“To that extent, I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Guest of Honor Speech at the Third World Science Fiction Convention—Denver, 1941 (p. 157)
“In the first place there isn’t a distinguished anthropologist in the world but what you’ll find one equally distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can’t agree on the simplest elements of their alleged science.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Funny sort of science! I guess they were pretty ignorant in those days.” “Don’t go running down our grandfathers. If it weren’t for them, you and I would be squatting in a cave, scratching fleas. No, Bub, they were pretty sharp; they just didn’t have all the facts. We’ve got more facts, but that doesn’t make us smarter.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that’s philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that’s science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy’s Law, sometimes offset in part by Brewster’s Factor: that’s engineering.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To proclaim the Pope infallible was their compendious security against hostile States and Churches, against human liberty and authority, against disintegrating tolerance and rationalizing science, against error and sin.”
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Vatican Council", The North British Review (1870)
“For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.”
C. J. Cherryh (born 1942) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004) – from the introduction to "Visible Light
“My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides.”
Bruce Sterling (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by.”
Bruce Sterling (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.”
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) (Vintage edition, 1993, ), Preface, p. XV
“The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1995). This "aphorism" was expressed in different forms by Josh Billings and Socrates.
“Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, very few [physicians] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.”
Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We admire the achievements of the Cuban revolution in the sphere of social welfare. We note the transformation from a country of imposed backwardness to universal literacy. We acknowledge your advances in the fields of health, education, and science.”
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one's body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.”
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, as quoted by Keegan Hamilton in the Grantland blog entry "Remembering Mandela, the Boxer" (December 6, 2013)
“If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only for aesthetic or commercial value. Primates are visual animals, and (particularly in science) illustration has a language and set of conventions all its own.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Useful quantification is so often the key to fruitful science.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.”
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) said by 1805 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They equally detest our third boss, who is Pilazinool of Shilamak, the big expert on intuitive analysis. Which means the science of jumping to conclusions. He’s good at it.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.”
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.”
Joe Haldeman (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science is--or should be--the greenest force of all.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Heroes of the Environment 2008" in Time (24 September 2008)
“Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions? As a system for generating answers. And what is the purpose of that? ...To know. And what will you do with your knowledge? ...Find out more. But why? I don’t know. It’s the way I am.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.”
Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth.”
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Silent Shepherds" (1958)
“La critique souvent n'est pas une science; c'est un métier, où il faut plus de santé que d'esprit, plus de travail que de capacité, plus d'habitude que de génie. Si elle vient d'un homme qui ait moins de discernement que de lecture, et qu'elle s'exerce sur de certains chapitres, elle corrompt et les lecteurs et l'écrivain.”
Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696) said by 1696 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time and Change, p. 2 (1912)
“Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience?”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology, with all its miraculous machinery, must go.”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.”
John Burroughs (1837–1921) said by 1921 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.”
Joseph Roux (1834–1905) said by 1905 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.”
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, "Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem." If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
Al Gore (born 1948) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testimony before Congress (21 March 2007), as quoted in "Gore Implores Congress To Save The Planet" at CBS Evening News (21 March 2007)
“That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization.”
Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Professor in The Lesson (1951)
“Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source