c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead.
— Jim Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!
I'm convinced that Theoretical Physicist is just another way of saying BS Artist.
— J.C. Cassels
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades
— Aldo Leopond
If no one ever deviated from currently accepted mainstream Science - we would still have the Flat Earth Society!
— Mary Nash Stoddard, Deadly Deception: Story Of Aspartame:  Shocking Expose Of The World's Most Controversial Sweetener
Let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness. What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. ... The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. ... This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities...
— Raymond Tallis
It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science.
— Jonathan Maberry, Dead of Night
Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.
— Edward O. Wilson
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
— Richard Feynman
There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course a quiet conscience.
— Euripides, Hippolytus
But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.
— Jody Lynn Nye, Human for a Day
A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.
— Nicholas D. Kristof
Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.
— John Twelve Hawks, The Dark River
Nature has no originality--I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats--repeats--repeats--repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.
— Mark Twain
If you don't understand how the world works, then everything is a mystery to you. If everything is magical and mysterious, then you really don't work on logic anymore. Then, everything is all about belief.
— Joy Reidenberg
There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half: “Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).
— Ray Comfort, Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution
Many of the big changes of the next 25 years will come from unknowns working in their bedrooms and garages...
— Charles W. Leadbeater
During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).
— David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
...if you use a standard called "biological value" to rate protein sources... soy finishes far below eggs, milk, fish, beef and chicken. The food with the highest biological value ever measured is whey protein...
— Lou Schuler, The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess
I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.
— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.
— John Mighton
The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
[I]n any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for 'something to be done,' but by patient study of the eternal laws.
— Henry Whitehead
Something but not nothing because nothing is an infinite possibility.
— Kyle Kipple
... researchers argue that it's of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating that which cannot be tested experimentally. Come to think of it, many still do in twenty-first-century society.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually 'decided' what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science--the reigning construct of male hegemony--precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest and mysterious characteristics of all the different beings, are unrepresented in the stainless steel edicts of experts. Where is the voice of the voiceless in the scientific literature, including the literature of environmental ethics?
— Karen Davis
never forget that it is not a pneumonia, but pneumonic man who is your patient
— William Withey Gull
The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
— Michael J. Findley, Antidisestablishmentarianism
Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and many others have done. Choose the miracle of creative competition over an idolatry of cash.They should stand up..
— David Brin
The laws of gravity cannot be held responcible for people falling in love.
— Albert Einstein
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History
If there was one overriding element to Faraday's character, it was humility. His 'conviction of deficiency,' as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life. Thus Faraday approached both his science and his everyday conduct unhampered by ego, envy, or negative emotion. In his work, he assumed the inevitability of error and failure; whenever possible, he harnessed these as guides toward further investigation. Faraday adhered to no particular school of scientific thought. Nor did he flinch when a favored hypothesis fell to the rigors of experiment.
— Alan W. Hirshfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday
A mathematician is an﻿ individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.
— Anton Chekhov, Five Great Short Stories
It was the merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. Take, for example, a ball or an egg: we can see their shapes at a glance. Yet suppose that instead of the impression made on our eye by an aggregate of white points forming the surface of an egg, we were presented with another, logically equivalent, presentation of these points as given by a list of their spatial co-ordinate values. It would take years of labour to discover the shape inherent in this aggregate of figures - provided it could be guessed at all. The perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system.
— Michael Polanyi
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
— John Ruskin
It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.
— Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.
— Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Q: But what do you think that the Bible, itself, says? Don't you know how it was arrived at?A: I never made a calculationQ: What do you think?A: I do not think about things I don't think about.Q: Do you think about things you do think about?A: Well, sometimes.
— Scopes Trial
One day, scientists will overtake LIGHT and crash into the DARKNESS.
— Paul McDermott
In science ... "discovery" can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.
— Thomas Hayden
Watching large mammals living their ordinary life in the jungle is extraordinary
— Antonio Rossano Mendes Pontes, Amazonia And Other Forests Of Brazil
As religion starts to mix with politics, we have a culture that allows us to fall behind what were previously third world nations, because we are now treating science the way we did sex in the 1950s, banning or burying evolution theories and research into promising lifesaving areas such as stem-cell research.
— Juan Enriquez, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future
We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, "The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out;" as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide His works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game
— Francis Bacon, The Advancement Of Learning
Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.
— Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
— Yann Martel
eorum omnium actiones in se invicem
— Isaac Newton
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
— E.M. Forster, Maurice
Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influence of cholesterol. She's fascinated by cholesterol. Says it's very beautiful: bright yellow. She says Ang is wholly uninterested. He has no idea what she does.I check this out for myself. 'What does Jane do?' I ask.'Science,' he says vaguely.
— Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film
Scientists study only those aspects of the universe that it is within their gift to study: what is observable; what is measurable and amenable to statistical analysis; and, indeed, what they can afford to study within the means and time available. Science thus emerges as a giant tautology, a "closed system". It can present us with robust answers only because its practitioners take very great care to tailor the questions.
— Colin Tudge
Fascinating ... The whole thing [the school dance] seems to work on a similar principle to a supercollider. You know, two streams of opposingly charged particles accelerated till they're just under the speed of light, and then crashed into each other? Only here alcohol, accentuated secondary sexual characteristics and primitive "rock and roll" beats take the place of velocity.
— Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
Monotheism generally allows for no greys. Ideas are either true or false. Hence, although science develops out of the alchemy of the medieval Christian milieu (derived from Arabic alchemy, which was stimulated by the much earlier Chinese alchemy), science is not understood by the nonscientific monotheistic population. The general Western public mistakenly thinks science presents unalterable truth, as does their religion, rather than theories to be tested and continually discarded to be replaced by new hypotheses, which is the actual scientific method.
— Jordan D. Paper, The Deities Are Many: A Polytheistic Theology
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.
— David Watson, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology
A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
— Bill Gaede
One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
...it seems to me that sometimes-or perhaps I might venture most of the time-occurrences have no cause at all. New stars appear and old ones vanish. Short hats become popular again. Things are as they are and do as they please for absolutely no reason at all.
— Galen Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent
Energy is the universal language of Nature
— Joey Lawsin
From year to year, and from age to age, we see [biologists] at work, adding no doubt much to the unknown, and advancing many important interests, but, at the same time, doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature. Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust.
— Robert Chambers
Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.
— William A. Dembski
The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!
— Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
— Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering
The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.
— Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life
A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
— Martin J. Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat
Prototypes of inventions that use novel combinations of resonance, magnetism, states of matter, certain geometries or inward swirling motion to unlock the secrets of universal energy have already been built. They provide proof of new or rediscovered principles. In many variations of these inventions, a small input triggers a disproportionately large output of useable power.""These energy converters don't violate any laws of physics if they simply tap into a previously unrecognized source of power - background space. A flow of energy from that source can continue day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows.
— Jeane Manning, Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World
The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.""I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.""There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell and having the bell keep on ringing. Sweet - who said his ideas came to him in dreams - turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets could be used to produce electricity, and wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other than the standard induction process. What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of motion. Sweet thought that if cosmic energy could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy would keep it moving.
— Jeane Manning, Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World
There are no proofs. There are only agreements
— Paul W. Silver
What we learn is that the scientist is as important a part of this experiment as the electron, and that the scientist and the electron are in fact connected. This experiment is the cornerstone of the holistic universe theory.
— Danny Scheinmann, Random Acts Of Heroic Love
Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary.
— David K. DeWolf, Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision
The population explosion is the primary force behind the remaining six groups of critical global events [diminishing land resources, diminishing water resources, the destruction of the atmosphere, the approaching energy crisis, social decline, and conflicts/increasing killing power].
— Ron Nielsen
Ultimately amorality is immorality.
— Roger M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective
We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it's form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist.
— Mohammed Ali
The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops.
— Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living
You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.
— Boris Johnson
Love is the grounding of our existence as humans and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.
— Humberto R. Maturana
A life thus names a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force-presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body. A life tear the fabric of the actual without ever coming fully 'out' in a person, place, or thing. A life points to ... 'matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them. A life is a vitality proper not to any individual but to 'pure immanence,' or that protean swarm that is not actual though it is real: 'A life contains only virtuals. It is made of virtualities.
— Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.
— Murray Gell-Mann
...Once again confirms that there is no such thing as genetically pure classification into different races.
— Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval "ur-matter," atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.
— Frank Close, The Void
We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.
— Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection,handed down from generation to generation,carried,literally,in the bodies of my ancestors.
— Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
Mankind needs new law to embrace new science.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Every time you think about settling on a more mundane question to answer, or reducing your sample size, or skipping an experiment that would strengthen your interpretation, remember that reviewers and editors of the major journals are looking for the small minority of papers that stand out from the rest.
— John N. Thompson
The universe evolved from something and nothing, and has most of these elemental dualpair until now.
— Joey Lawsin
Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.
— Werner Heisenberg
The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science
— Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Live
Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.
— William Harvey
Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings.	Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket.	‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’	Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’	‘What is the point of it all?’	‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’	‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.
— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.
— Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven.
— Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Live
Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them, the rise of science. 
— Rodney Stark
They have to say SOMETHING. Maria Bartiromo can't exactly look into the camera and say that the Dow is down half a percent today because of random Brownian motion.
— Philip M. Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
some people want just, to sit back and watch the world burn.
— R. Douglas Weber, Solomon's Key The Codis Project: A Conspiracy Thriller
The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.
— Maimonides
Gwynned lies two days westwards; still further south, the weregeld calls. Mayhap with All-Father Woden's favour, my deeds may yet inspire the skalds.
— George Gordon Byron
Individual organ of human brain makes individual decision for working of brain and driving behavior in humans.
— Santosh Kalwar, Human Behavior on the Internet
So there were two worlds: the perceived world, a dimension of adjectives, equations and brush strokes, a surface dazzling with our efforts to render it, but ultimately bearing only our own reflections; and the impenetrable world, the plumbless dark full of latent particles, the primordial cauldron which, like a mother, gives us our being but is a lifelong riddle.
— Bia Lowe, Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills
……but work in the field has nothing to do with dignity or with anything except patience, concentration, and eternal vigilance
— C. William Beebe
perhaps,thought Felix,that's what magic is--physics with a different twist to it.my world just hasn't discovered the twist.
— Elizabeth Kay, Back To The Divide
You stupid fool, you know very well it's not a short novel, but something longer...A piece of work you've got to buckle down to, that needs peace and concentration. Being able to wake up in the morning and lie in bed for a while. 
— Iván Mándy
A general principle concerning the gender of bears has been established years ago by bear supervisor König from Bern, after over thirty years of observation. It allows for predictions and states, in short, that when a female bear bears three cubs, and they aren't all male or female, it will invariably be either two males and a female, or two females and a male.
— Wolfgang Klein
The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.
— Warren Ellis
The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Even if ninety-nine percent of what you discover is later proven wrong, it is the one percent that is right that matters.
— Steven Magee
Very high altitude extreme night shift work is a class 2A carcinogen that may result in lifelong disabling sleep disorders, high cholesterol, radiation sickness and heart, lung and brain damage.
— Steven Magee
One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.
— Steven Magee
Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.
— Steven Magee
Research suggests that sea level adapted humans that work at the very high altitude 13,796 feet summit of Mauna Kea may eventually develop sleep apnea and fatigue from the low oxygen environment.
— Steven Magee
The Moon is the light of the night.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
All of the above scenario's (wars and atrocities) were caused by the robot's possession of human emotions and thus motivation. ISMAIL has none and it and its successors will have none. It's sole motivation is to solve all of humanity's problems. While in the beginning, human emotions were clearly a survival mechanism, they are also the source of all conflict and clearly the least desirable trait for an artificial being, and maybe for modern humans as well. It is possible that emotions will evolve in an ASI, but unlikely because that takes millennia and requires some motivation like survival. ASI's survival depends on its service to humans. Anything else, we'd just pull the plug.
— Steven Warr
As a general rule, if anyone ever asks you to put stockings on a ninety-year old deceased Romanian woman with oedema, your answer should be no.
— Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
[T]he craft of science . . . is an oral tradition as much as a written one.
— Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives
The stars of heaven gives light.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Science can't prove everything! Say, a scientist saw a fish splashing in the pond. On the next day he shared it with someone. But, the listener wanted proof. How would the scientist prove that he was speaking the truth?
— Md. Ziaul Haque
Who is the spring of living water? The Sovereign Lord.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Science and spirituality are not opposed entities that try to claim ownership of the universal truth but rather different layers of awareness about this world.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D., Sleepers: A Little Book on How to Find Hope, Meaning and the Courage to Fall in Love with Your Dreams
A foot note in Scale, Geoffery West:The full quotation from Einstein is worth repeating because it emphasizes a central dictum of science:"Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed this into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics, indeed of modern science altogether."Taken from Einstein's "On the Methods of Theoretical Physics," Essays on modern Science (New York:Dover, 2009) 12-21
— Einstein Albert 1879-1955
I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me in trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
— Carl Sagan
Straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist behaving as if it were not true.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Software always remain softly for End users! But sometimes hardly to developers!
— Bananeza Pacifique
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
— Paul Valéry
It's true. I doubt. I doubt because I seek the truth. Doubt has served me well.
— Bradley Steffens, The Prisoner of Al Hakim
I think a lot of science can seem like magic before it's explained properly. Sometimes we don't have the observations, the data, or the right words yet to explain it. Surely there was a time long ago when people watched a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis and thought of it as magic.
— Gina Linko, Flower Moon
Some may smile and may feel that this is but a new version of the old dream of the perfection of man. It is that, but it is something more. The old dreams of the cultural perfections of man were always sharply constrained by his inherent, inherited imperfections and limitations... We now glimpse another route - the chance to ease and consciously perfect beyond our present vision this remarkable product of two billion years of evolution.
— Siddharta Mukherjee
As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane had described it in 1923, once the power to control genes had been harnessed, "no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.
— Siddharta Mukherjee