c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
— Tim O'Brien, Tomcat In Love
The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?
— Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels
— Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
— Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold
But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways---air, and water, and land---because of ungovernable science.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
— Niels Bohr
To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?
— Angela Carter
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified.–Neville Goddard
— Neville Goddard
In a manner of speaking. As we intend for you to found a dynasty. And that dynasty will rule society until it has progressed enough to-""Overthrow the dynasty in a revolutionary, blood filled coup!" Iggy said eagerly.We all looked at him."Just saying." He sheepishly took a bite of cookie.
— James Patterson, Angel
It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Science is based on faith too!' in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on 'faith', then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, 'The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests' faith can't do the same.' Are you sure you wish to go there, oh faithist? Perhaps, on further reflection, you would prefer to retract this whole business of 'Science is a religion too!
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Less Wrong Sequences
Big whirls have little whirls,That feed on their velocity;And little whirls have lesser whirls,And so on to viscosity.
— Lewis Fry Richardson
Its the fate of all creators: They fall in love with their creations.
— Michael  Grant, Eve & Adam
Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.
— Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics
Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
— Ray Bradbury
Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.
— Rudolf Arnheim
Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. 
— C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
— Albert Einstein
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars
There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.
— Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. 
— John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, On the Gods and Other Essays
A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
— B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to be a cruel delusion.No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days or weeks, totally played out by the publishing industry and the broadcast industry. Nothing is too arcane to escape the treatment, the process. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.Some people prefer to believe in conspiracy because they are made anxious by random acts. Believing in conspiracy is almost comforting because, in a sense, a conspiracy is a story we tell each other to ward off the dread of chaotic and random acts. Conspiracy offers coherence.I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfillment in America... I see this desperation against the backdrop of brightly colored packages and products and consumer happiness and every promise that American life makes day by day and minute by minute everywhere we go. Discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer’s labor. Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. Every new novel stretches the term of the contract—let me live long enough to do one more book.You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
— Don DeLillo
Nothing great is ever accomplished by following standards.
— Geoffroy Birtz
Science is the topography of ignorance.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
— Albert A. Bartlett
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
— Alan W. Watts, The Essential Alan Watts
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
— William Lawrence Bragg
Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . .
— James D. Watson
The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.
— Peter Medawar
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.
— Bill Gates, The Road Ahead
No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.
— François Rabelais, Pantagruel
Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.
— Michael Crichton, Next
A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Your beliefs don't make you a better person, your behavior does.
— Sukhraj S. Dhillon
I do not like odd things until I can understand them.
— Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.
— Benjamin Disraeli
The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.
— Niels Bohr
If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds. One cup of fixit fizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good.
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
— Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
Take chances! Get messy! Make mistakes!
— Joanna Cole
Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
— Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
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.
It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true
— Freeman Dyson
In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.
— Carl Zimmer
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow`s speed.
— Howard Nemerov
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
— Bertrand Russell
When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?
— Enrico Bombieri
What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.
— Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
— Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
— Theodosius Dobzhansky
Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.
— Michael Shermer
I think we have different value systems." —Arthur"Well mine's better." —Ford
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. 
— Murray Gell-Mann
There are no things man was not meant to know. There are, perhaps, things man is too dumb to figure out, but that's a different problem.
— Michael Kurland
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
— Carl Sagan
The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
— Max Planck, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science
I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
— Edward O. Wilson
I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, "I felt at one with the divine source of creation." Mary Roach on a conducted tour of Hades. I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I'VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused myself and went to the bar, to commune with spirits I know how to relate to.
— Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable. Welcome to the cosmos, full of mass you can measure but not manhandle, driven by a force you can infer but not explain.
— Tim Radford, The Crisis Of Life On Earth: Our Legacy From The Second Millenium
[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence” go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.
— Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?
— Tom Holt
Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. 
— Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.
— Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
— Rachel Carson
Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
— Humphry Davy
Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams - day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing - are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.
— L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz
It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
— Rollo May, The Cry for Myth
Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.
— John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
Today something unusual happened; I was walking without even knowing, where I was going. I was smiling without any cause. I was just happy without reasons. I can tell you that birds do sing, leaves of trees, do dance, and it’s beautiful. I am, a complete nature boy! Maybe, I was fully satisfied that sunlight was falling on my cheek. I got the power to love myself, nature and rest of humankind. Cheers, Everyone!
— Santosh Kalwar
Science is the search for the truth--it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution of international problems, and not an effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism.
— Linus Pauling, Linus Pauling on Peace: A Scientist Speaks Out on Humanism and World Survival
One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
— Steven Weinberg
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.
— Max Planck
The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for.It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.
— Terence McKenna
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
— John C. Eccles
None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.
— David G. Wells
For scientists, reality is not optional.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That's their mistake, not my failing.
— Richard Feynman
Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
— Daniel C. Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
— Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, The
If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.
— J. Richard Gott III, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time
[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.
— Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
In every man, there is a child. In every woman, there is a mother. 
— Santosh Kalwar
I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies
— Johannes Kepler
the mind is a neural computer
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes.Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
— Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.
— Arthur Stanley Eddington
I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.
— Galileo Galilei, Lettere di Galileo Galilei
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.These dates are incorrect.Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC.These suggestions are also incorrect.Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.
— Terry Pratchett
It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hi
— Ernest Rutherford
The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It's time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Sure, at some level scientists know nanobots will destroy mankind. They just can't resist seeing how it happens.
— Cracked.com, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
— John Maynard Keynes
Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
— Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.
— Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?
— Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.
— Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
— S.J. Perelman
The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.
— Stuart A. Kauffman
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.
— Karl Jaspers, Man In The Modern Age
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.
— John Stuart Mill
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist ei
— John Irving
Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course. 
— Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography
Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.
— Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion
— Francis Bacon
Gravity always wins
— Michael Hirsch
I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.
— Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives.
— Lloyd Alexander
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridicu
— Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.
— Mother Teresa
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
— Robert M. Sapolsky
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.
— Lee Smolin
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
— H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.
— Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Impossibility only lasts until you find new unbelievable hard evidences.
— Toba Beta
To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical.
— Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences
The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.
— Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble — though it would definitely be green.
— Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life. He may then perhaps do a little research of his own and make a very few discoveries which are passed on to other men. From this point of view the search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals.
— Alan Turing
Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.
— Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.
— Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to se
— Alexander Graham Bell
I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain.An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field.
— Jay Ingram, Burning House
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
— Carl Sagan
We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
They didn't understand what they were doing.I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
— Michael Crichton, Prey
Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others' welfare.This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
— Peter Ustinov
Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take. 
— Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.
— Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
— John James Audubon
It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.
— Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God