“Some scientists hesitate to continue in a given field of research as soon as its application becomes apparent. This refusal to apply knowledge when it exists seems to us, however, to be as unrealistic as the attempt to apply knowledge before it exists.”

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text

1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)

in his review of Joseph Beskiba's textbook, published in the Österreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (September 7, 1844), as quoted by [Peter Schuster, Moving the stars: Christian Doppler, his life, his works and principle, and the world after, Living edition, 2005, 3901585052, 78]

As quoted by George H. W. Bush in remarks while presenting National Medals of Science and Technology http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/papers/1990/90111300.html (13 November 1990). This might be a paraphrase of statements from his introduction to "Science The Endless Frontier" (1945), rather than a direct quote. (see below)

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 171

Inaugural Address of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London (1851).
Context: Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to the accomplishment that great end to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind.... The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity and even by the power of lightning... The knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of all of the community at large... no sooner is a discovery or invention made, than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts: the products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital.... Science discovers these laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge.

Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

Revue Scientifique (1871)
Variant translation: There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.