Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,161,745 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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Science
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“Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.”
Warren Weaver (1894–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that God has revealed Himself to many at many times and in many places. Indeed, He continuously reveals Himself to man today : every new discovery of science is a further "revelation" of the order which God has built into His universe.”
Warren Weaver (1894–1978) said by 1978 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one.”
John Herschel (1792–1871) said by 1871 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am hopeful that Antarctica in its symbolic robe of white will shine forth as a continent of peace as nations working together there in the cause of science set an example of international cooperation.”
Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement made during International Geophysical Year (IGY) operations in 1957, inscribed on the Byrd Memorial at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
“Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.”
Jamie Zawinski (born 1968) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.”
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the wisdom with which we bring science to bear in the war against disease, in the creation of new industries, and in the strengthening of our Armed Forces depends in large measure our future as a nation.”
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?”
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) said by 1850 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.”
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Orgonotic Pulsation in International Journal of Sex-Economy and Orgone-Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, (March, 1944); Reich throughout his writings seems to use the word "mysticism" in a sense strongly related to claims of "my…
“I am well aware of the fact that the human race has known about the existence of a universal energy related to life for many ages. However, the basic task of natural science consisted of making this energy usable. This is the sole difference between my work and all preceding knowledge.”
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) said by 1957 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Archives of the Orgone Institute; quoted in "The New American Medicine" in Journal of The Mindshift Institute (2002)
“The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.”
Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Untimely Thoughts (1917-18) (original: Наиболее успешно и могуче будит в нашей душе ее добрые начала сила искусства. Как наука является разумом мира, так искусство — сердце его.)
“Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now.”
Joel Spolsky (born 1965) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is science made clear.”
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bourgeois political economy … never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people’ but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.”
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 9
“The Preface to the Phenomenology is one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times, constituting no less an attempts than to reinstate philosophy as the highest form of human knowledge, as ‘the Science.’ P. 97”
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) said by 1979 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.”
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) said by 1979 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.”
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the author is so interested in Science, why doesn't she take a course in it?”
Peg Bracken (1918–2007) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I Didn't Come Here to Argue (1969), Fawcett Crest edition, page 49.
“I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path.”
Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wind and Beyond, 1967
“It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science—the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter—should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journal entry (9 March 1850), quoted in Thomas Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Volume 5, January 1849–December 1855, ed. Thomas Pinney (1981), p. 99
“I believe that the progress of experimental science, the free intercourse of nation with nation, the unrestricted influx of commodities from countries where they are cheap, and the unrestricted efflux of labour towards countries where it is dear, will soon produce, nay, I believe that they are beginning to produce, a great and most blessed social revolution.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) first seen 1852 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Edinburgh (2 November 1852), quoted in Speeches of the Right Honourable T. B. Macaulay, M.P. (1854), p. 517
“It was the sort of review board that Jeff thoroughly disapproved of; hands-on bureaucratic interference in university and agency programs always lead to pure science being impoverished.”
Peter F. Hamilton (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.”
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.”
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fact in Fiction", p. 266. First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1960)
“I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to 'require[e] scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary'. But interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.”
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lee v. Weisman (1992, dissenting); decided June 24, 1992.
“There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman
“All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) first seen 1824 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 14, 1824. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 360
“Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world's first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.”
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Victoria (23 December 1908)
“The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law.”
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The law of causality is no longer applied in quantum theory and the law of conservation of matter is no longer true for the elementary particles. Obviously Kant could not have foreseen the new discoveries, but since he was convinced that his concepts would be "the basis of any future metaphysics that can be called science" it is interesting to see where his arguments have been wrong.”
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ven in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions. ...[I]t is well known that the concept of infinity leads to contradictions... but it would be practically impossible to construct... mathematics without this concept.”
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) said by 1976 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black — the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem.”
Frank Crane (1861–1928) said by 1928 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them — or they'll march. Some of them livid and some ofttp://www.sacred-texts.com/fort/damn/damn01.htm Ch. 1 at sacred-texts.com]”
Charles Fort (1874–1932) said by 1932 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native.”
Charles Fort (1874–1932) said by 1932 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”
Charles Fort (1874–1932) said by 1932 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.”
Charles Fort (1874–1932) said by 1932 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.”
Steve Ballmer (born 1956) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ballmer Boosts Harvard Computer Science Faculty" (13 November 2014)
“The entire cosmos is made out of one and the same world-stuff, operated by the same energy as we ourselves. "Mind" and "matter" appears as two aspects of our unitary mind-bodies. There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion; they are both organs of evolving humanity.”
Julian Huxley (1887–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“…the science fiction community is not, and was not especially back then, a gay-friendly organization…”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his views about the genre and LGBT issues in “Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany” in Los Angeles Review of Books (2019 Jul 6)
“If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom.”
Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now at last, as it has become apparent that the heedless and unrestrained use of chemicals is a greater menace to ourselves than to the targets, the river which is the science of biotic control flows again, fed by new streams of thought.”
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge.”
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should.”
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are other disturbing factors ... One is the growing interrelations between professional organizations and industry, and between science and industry.”
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember that sign they hung up in an EPA office during the Reagan administration, "No good deed goes unpunished"? Under George Bush, no good science goes unpunished.”
David Helvarg (born 1951) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Grist magazine, January 3, 2005
“Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind’s ability to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention much of everyday life, would be impossible.”
John Derbyshire (born 1945) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Derb Quotes, National Review, November 20, 2003.