“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: The Wealth of Nations
Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 2 (p. 26).
Context: What is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: The Wealth of Nations
“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
#32
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
“When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.”
William R. Alger (1822–1905) American clergyman and poet
Reported in Maturin Murray Ballou, Treasury of thought: Forming an encyclopedia of quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors (1884), p. 460.
Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010) Italian physicist
Address to the Holy Father, in The cultural values of science, The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Scripta Varia 105 (8-11 November 2002), page xiv http://www.vatican.edu/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/archivio/s.v.105_cultural_values/part1.pdf
Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. xii
John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist
Source: Accepting the Universe (1920), p.108
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey
Speech (October 1927); quoted in Atatürk’ten Düşünceler by E. Z. Karal, p. 59