Quotes about science
page 10

“No matter how far our spiritual culture may continue to progress, no matter how much the natural sciences may grow, becoming ever more profound and more inclusive, no matter how much the human spirit may will to expand, that human spirit will never escape from the majesty and ethical sublimity of Christianity, as it shimmers and shines in the Gospels.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

A message to Eckermann on March 11, (1832), translated by Albert Schweizer in Goethe: Five Studies http://archive.is/tOo5z (1961), Beacon Press, p. 56

Nature

“De Saussur… develops the concept of semiology as the science which studies the functioning of signs in society, and treats linguistics as a branch of such a general science of signs.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 4

Study

“There is also a considerable tendency to define the subject as a kind of meeting place of science and art. This is exemplified by Eckert. He pleads for artistic imagination and intuition in cartographic portrayal and claims that the inter-action of such talents with scientific geography produces the aesthetic map. There is no question about the importance of imagination and new ideas, but it is equally important that significant processes be objectively investigated, whether it be the visual consumption of a graphic technique or a process in geomorphology. It can perhaps best be approached by a comparison of the aims, techniques involved, and the results accomplished by each activity”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 17; as cited in: Kirk Patrick Goldsberry (2007) Real-time Traffic Maps. p. 23-24

Art, Imagination, Idea, Question

“The very system of education which was deemed essential for forging bonds of unbroken alliance with the British power succeeded in unleashing revolutionary ideas and thoughts, which ultimately helped to throw off the yoke of alien rule in India. If we take a dispassionate view of what happened during the last one century, we must acknowledge that this has been an era in which good has been mixed with evil. The contact between the Indian mind and western thought and civilisation did not enslave the soul of India. In every domain of thought, in arts and architecture, in science, in history, philosophy and letters, in social services and in religious thought, great Indians gave their best, maintaining their stamp of originality as well as imbibing and assimilating fruits of western skill and knowledge. Though the number of Indians affected by such spread of knowledge was comparatively small, many of them assumed a much needed political leadership and became the instruments of agitation and mass movements, leading ultimately to the political liberation of their country. The cultural Renaissance preceded and created the silent Revolution.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Delhi University Convocation on 13th December 1952.

Education, Art, Soul, History

“You are graduating at a time when there is a full-fledged assault on truth and reason. Just log on to social media for 10 seconds. It will hit you right in the face. People denying science, concocting elaborate, hurtful conspiracies theories about child abuse rings operating out of pizza parlors. Drumming up rampant fear about undocumented immigrants, Muslims, minorities, the poor. Turning neighbor against neighbor and sowing division at a time when we desperately need unity. Some are even denying things we see with our own eyes. Like the size of crowds. And then defending themselves by talking about “alternative facts.””

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Post Presidential Election, Wellesley Commencement Speech (2017)

People, Truth, Fear, Time

“Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required: say, the interplay of enzymes in a cell, of many mental processes conscious and unconscious, the structure and dynamics of social systems and the like.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), p. xix

Intelligence, Understanding, Learning, Universe

“Some students at BYU perceive general education as an unfortunate burden that does little for them professionally. I was rudely awakened to this perception the first time that I taught Biology 100. Having loved biology my entire life, I assumed that all 250 students in my class would be as enthusiastic as I was to study biology. I quickly learned that most of my students dreaded having to take the course and had little interest in the sciences. My challenge was to help them learn to reverently admire the intricate wonders of God's creation that are evident when we study life. General education is especially important at BYU, for here a thoughtful study of the arts and sciences can be, in President Kimball's words, "bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel."”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Let me share with you a few of my own experiences.
The quoted line is taken from "Education for Eternity" (12 Septemebr 1967), by Spencer W. Kimball, p. 11, preschool address to BYU faculty and staff.
The Arts, the Sciences, and the Light of the Gospel (2000)

Love, Life, God, Education

“There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvelous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love which the heart feds, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 220.

Love, Wisdom, God, Faith

“Identity is as foreign to science as the good, and just as the good is reduced to something palpable, one’s own is raised to something vaguer but shareable.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

“I wish, I were big enough, like Einstein, to do what he did on one occasion. A hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner was organised for him to speak, and leaders of America in all fields, particularly in the field of science, were invited to hear the great man. When his turn came, he rose and said:'I've nothing to say,' and sat down. You can imagine the consternation, quite apart from the wasted cost of the dinner! Realising the frightful effect his remarks had on the audience, Einstein got up again and said: 'When I've something to say, I'll let you know.”

J. R. D. Tata (1904–1993) Indian businessman

Address to the Lions Club of Jamshedpur, August 22, 1963.
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders

Imagination

“Great talents are not, before God, a substitute for love for Himself; the possession of a profound intellect does not free any man from the obligations resting on the heart for purity and holiness; a reputation for attainments in science does not settle the question whether he is righteous before his Maker; refined manners are not, in the sight of God, a substitute for the graces of the Spirit; God does not justify man on the ground of human learning; attainments in chemistry, anatomy, geology, botany, astronomy, or skill in sculpture and painting, — these do not prepare a man to die.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 114.

Love, God, Question, Learning

“Parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart. ... What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology. This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.”

Richard Freed (1928) music critic, editor, and broadcaster

"The Tech Industry’s War on Kids" Medium March 11, 2018 https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-kids-c452870464ce

Children, World, Family, Game

“Teachers of science in schools and colleges must be masters of the tools for ensuring integrity in science and must instill them in their students.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

1994, p. 45
Integrity in Science (1985)

School, Teachers

“I know I shall be called heterodox, and that unseen lightning flashes and unheard thunderbolts will be playing around my head, when I say that women will never be profound students in any other department except music while they give four hours a day to the practice of music. I should by all means encourage every woman who is born with musical gifts to study music; but study it as a science and an art, and not as an accomplishment; and to every woman who is not musical, I should say, 'Don't study it at all;' you cannot afford four hours a day, out of some years of your life, just to be agreeable in company upon possible occasions. If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist? Do you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of study of something for which you were born? When I see that girls who are required by their parents to go through with the irksome practising really become respectable performers, I wonder what four hours a day at something which they loved, and for which God designed them, would do for them. I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then thinking she was an astronomer!”

Maria Mitchell (1818–1889) American astronomer

Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (illustrated) by Maria Mitchell, 1896, p. 189.

Love, Life, Women, God

“You see, when we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past, we're talking about our origins. We weren't there, you can't observe that, whether it's molecules-to-man evolution or the creation account. When you're talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science: knowledge concerning the past. Here at the Creation Museum, we make no apology about the fact that our origins or historical science is actually based upon the biblical account of origins. When you research science text books being used in public schools, what we found is this: by and large the origins or historical science is based on man's ideas about the past, for instance the ideas of Darwin.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

Books, School, Idea, Knowledge

“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Law, Nature

“I have a feeling that if the women of India take to science and interest themselves in the progress and advance of science as well, they will achieve what even men have failed to do. Women have one quality--the quality of devotion. It is one of the most important passports to success in science. Let us therefore not imagine that intellect is a sole prerogative of males only in science.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Raman's views on role of women quoted in Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern India's Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

Women, Men, Feeling, Imagination

“In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54-55

Life

“The real reason that physicians are rotten investors is that it never occurs to them that finance is a science, just like medicine.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Introduction, p. ix.
The Four Pillars of Investing (2002)

“The science or art of war requires a freedom of thought, and leisure to reflect upon the various incidents that daily occur, which cannot be had where the whole of one's time is engrossed in clerical employments. The time devoted to this employment is not the only injury I feel; but it confines my thoughts as well as engrosses my time. It is like a merchandise of small wares.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1776)

War, Art, Feeling, Freedom

“Ancient science had sought knowledge of what things are, to be contemplated as an end in itself satisfying to the knower. In contrast, modern science seeks knowledge of how things work, to be used as a means for the relief and comfort of all humanity, knowers and non-knowers alike.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Source: The Problem of Technology (1993), p. 7

Knowledge

“They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Olof Alexandersson: Living Water
Living Water

God, Hope, Fools

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)

Literature, Reality

“Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method … may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books, World, Error, Birth

“Many of the greatest masters of the mathematical sciences were first attracted to mathematical inquiry by problems relating to numbers, and no one can glance at the periodicals of the present day which contain questions for solution without noticing how singular a charm such problems still continue to exert. The interest in numbers seems implanted in the human mind, and it is a pity that it should not have freer scope in this country. The methods of the theory of numbers 271 are peculiar to itself, and are not readily acquired by a student whose mind has for years been familiarized with the very different treatment which is appropriate to the theory of continuous magnitude; it is therefore extremely desirable that some portion of the theory should be included in the ordinary course of mathematical instruction at our University. From the moment that Gauss, in his wonderful treatise of 1801, laid down the true lines of the theory, it entered upon a new day, and no one is likely to be able to do useful work in any part of the subject who is unacquainted with the principles and conceptions with which he endowed it.”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 467 : On the theory of numbers

Mathematics, Question, Problem, Universe

“I have been working in the area of solid state chemistry for nearly four decades. When I first got seriously interested in the subject in the early 1950s it was still in in infancy. Very few chemists, let alone others, recognized solid state chemistry as an integral part of the main-stream chemistry. In spite of such benign tolerance, solid state chemistry has gradually emerged to become a crucial component of modern solid state and material science.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

[R. A. Mashelkar, Solid State Chemistry: Selected Papers of C N R Rao, http://books.google.com/books?id=8ZSfo_HUk7oC&pg=PA4, 28 February 1995, World Scientific, 978-981-279-589-2, 4]

Parting

“Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 36.

Mathematics, Understanding

“Now what is science? …it is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural and hidden kinship. Science, in other words, is a system of relations. …it is in relations alone that objectivity must be sought. …it is relations alone which can be regarded as objective.
External objects… are really objects and not fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 11: Science and Reality

Nature, Appearance

“I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in "ABC 7.30 Report" http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2638036.htm, July 22, 2002. <br class="br">2002

Change

“I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/160/mode/1up pp. 160-161

Nature, Appearance

“The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience… Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion, Idea

“Our strongest ally in the battle against death is the combination of futurism, transhumanism, science, technology, philosophy, and politics.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Death, Future

“Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914), p. 39

“The history of the development of Logical Empiricist theories since the turn of the century does not allow any clear canonization of a philosophical school in the strict sense, since what we are dealing with is a dynamic between center and periphery. The varying receptions of Wittgenstein, Tarski and Popper have influenced the development of various philosophies of science inspired by rational reconstruction, on the one hand, and by encyclopedic models on the other.”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

Source: "What is the Vienna Circle?" 2006, p. xviii

School, History, Sense

“There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

K 72
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist

As quoted in Rutherford at Manchester (1962) by J. B. Birks
Unsourced variants:
That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.
That which is not measurable is not science. — (which is also attributed to Lord Kelvin)

“Motion study is the science of eliminating wastefulness resulting from using unnecessary, ill-directed, and inefficient motions. The aim of motion study is to find and perpetuate the scheme of least waste methods of labor.
By its use we have revolutionized several of the trades. There is probably no art or trade that cannot have its output doubled by the application of the principles of motion study.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Primer of scientific management, 1912, p. 8

Art, Study

“Astronomers… have a common ground for discussion with musicians in the harmony of the stars and musical concords in tetrads and triads of the fourth and the fifth, and with geometricians in the subject of vision; and in all other sciences many points, perhaps all, are common so far as the discussion of them is concerned. But the actual undertaking of works which are brought to perfection by the hand and its manipulation is the function of those who have been specially trained to deal with a single art.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 16

Art, Music, Star, Perfection

“The proper form of science is explanation and argument, and the proper form of religion and morality is exhortation and command; but that of art is simply the directest embodiment of its theme as the theme itself requires. Assured that the theme is compatible with the ideal nature of art, the artist knows that it will justify itself and work its own work, if it can only find expression in its natural embodiment.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.201-2

Religion, Art, Nature

“I grew up in a large communal apartment where most of the rooms were occupied by my family and relations and only a few by outsiders. The house was pervaded by a strong traditional family spirit — a vital enthusiasm for work and respect for professional competence. Within the family we provided one another with mutual support, just as we shared a love of literature and science.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Nobel autobiography (1975)

Love, Family, Communication, Literature

“It has seemed to me that the theory (calcul) of probabilities ought to serve as the basis for the study of all the sciences, and particularly of the sciences of observation.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Instructions populaires sur le calcul des probability (1825) English translation by R. Beamish (1839)

Study

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Home, Waiting

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

People, Age, Religion, Art

“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

People, World, Religion, Understanding

“Today, we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don’t happen to agree with their agendas. Some call it "pseudo-science," others call it "faith-based science," but when you notice where this negligence tends to take place, you might as well call it "political science."”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/news/mayor_michael_bloombergs_address_to_graduates_of_johns_hopkins_university_school_of_medicine
Faith Based Science

People, Faith

“There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

"Evolution of the Human Brain" (1964), p. 3

Pain, Pleasure, Color, Understanding

“As biomedical research continues to provide us with greater understanding and with powerful new tools, the scientific community has, I think, a dual responsibility. One is to push forward the frontiers to make medical advances possible, to understand what cancer is, to develop new ways of treating cancer, to prevent heart disease, and to develop ways of preventing, ultimately, disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and depression. But science also has a second responsibility to society, which is to point out what we need to be concerned about as a society and to bring to bear humane, balanced, and thoughtful ways of dealing with the advances that come from biomedical research. Scientists need to speak to these issues.”

W. Maxwell Cowan (1931–2002) South African-American neurobiologist and neuro-anatomist

Squire, Larry R. (ed). (2004). William Maxwell (Max) Cowan http://www.sfn.org/~/media/SfN/Documents/Autobiographies/c5.ashx. The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography. Volume 4. Elsevier. pp. 144-209. ISBN 0-12-660246-8.

Disease, Way, Communication, Understanding

“Prof Brown used to say, if it is worth doing, it must be worth publishing. Faraday had said much the same many years earlier. In science, we “ work, finish and publish”. These statements have guided me all through my professional life.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Source: Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry (2010), p. 30

Life

“O star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there,
To waft us home the message of despair?”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part II, line 325
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Home, Star, Despair

“Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Article on Encyclopedia
L'Encyclopédie (1751-1766)

Men, Learning

“Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.”

Jean Chrétien (1934) 20th Prime Minister of Canada

Source: My Years As Prime Minister (2007), Chapter Ten, Power behind the Throne, p. 238

Nature, Problem

“"Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 10

Communication, Time, Past

“Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. … The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium … discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay … The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. … Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Law, Speed

“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#39
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Fools, Confidence, Teachers

“[T]he application of algebra to geometry… far more than any of his metaphysical speculations, has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617. https://books.google.com/books?id=ojQNAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA617

“Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 153

“At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures… Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 116

Mathematics, Time, Success

“Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say.
Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

"The Tucson Zoo", p. 8
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Way, Loss, Parting

“Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 98

“Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), Ch. 3, Beyond Language, p. 50.

Nature, Problem

“Knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act II, scene iv.
Manfred (1817)

Knowledge, Happiness

“Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Law, Problem, Universe, Time

“The function of logical analysis is to analyse all knowledge, all assertions of science and of everyday life, in order to make clear the sense of each such assertion and the connections between them. One of the principal tasks of the logical analysis of a given proposition is to find out the method of verification for that proposition.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1935) Philosophy and Logical Syntax. p. 9-10

Life, Knowledge, Sense

“To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.
Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Preface

History, Failure, Nature, Problem

“Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I. R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, And Then What? (June 2018)

Justice, Confidence, History, Motivation

“You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 2, "The Three-personal God"
Mere Christianity (1952)

God, Religion, Way

“When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug? (2006)

Nature, Study

“Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth-century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that — the circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for granted.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Adams quotes — and takes the title of this chapter — from Karl Pearson's classic work The Grammar of Science: "In the chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions." "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous."
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Sense, Universe

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“The French botanist and chemist Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau (1700–1782) identified a fungal disease on the bulbs of saffron crocus (now named Helicobasidium purpureum) and illustrated its sclerotia on the bulbs. His report was read to the Academie royale des Sciences in April 1728; it was “wellconceived, thorough, and conclusive, and led to his election as adjoint chimiste in the same year” (Eklund 1971:223). Duhamel discovered that this fungus spreads underground from one bulb to another. In his Éléments d’agriculture (two volumes, 1762; English edition, 1764), he also accepted insects as a cause of some plant diseases.”

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700–1782) French naval engineer, botanist and agronomist

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, " A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 29: Plant Disease Studies During the 1700s http://esapubs.org/bulletin/current/history_list/history29.pdf." in: Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, July 2008, p. 231-242.

Disease, Reading

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Books, Color, Way, History

“In science there are uses many classifications of entities - plants, animals, rocks, soils, stars, diseases, occupations, and so on. In these taxonomies a classification must display genetic relations - for example, an evolutionary family tree of animal species - but its prime purpose is to aid in the identification of entities… Classification enables us to select, from the whole universe of known entities, the one that best matches one newly encountered.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

Disease, Family, Star, Tree

“According to Taylor, the principles of Efficiency are:
(1) Science, not rule of thumb.
(2) Harmony, not discord.
(3) Cooperation, not competition.
(4) Maximum output, not restricted output.
(5) The development of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Source: 1910s, Ads and Sales (1911), p. 8

“The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life … the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

An das Leben der Studenten tritt die Frage nach seiner bewußten Einheit heran. ... Das Auszeichnende im Studentenleben ist in der Tat der Gegenwille, sich einem Prinzip zu unterwerfen, mit der Idee sich zu durchdringen. Der Name der Wissenschaft dient vorzüglich, eine tiefeingesessene, verbürgerte Indifferenz zu verbergen.
The Life of Students (1915)

Life, Idea, Question, Indifference

“…among no people of the pre-Christian era do we find so great a number of intellectually prominent men who, by their words and by their whole personality, have devoted themselves to the religious guidance of their nation, as among the people of the early Bible… our Germanists would do well to notice… the science of religions is able to make the comparison; and to the people of Israel it will award this certificate: You have excelled them all by the sublimity of your religion…”

Michael von Faulhaber (1869–1952) German Roman Catholic Cardinal

Sermon 1

Men, People, Religion, Personality

“Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer’s similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 154.

Art, Mathematics

“The pioneering practitioners of the new science knew that they were producing a new kind of knowledge and so they declared this newness in the titles of their books and articles. Thus we have Galileo's Two New Sciences, Boyle's New Experiments, Kepler's New Astronomy, and Tartaglia's New Science. When Ben Jonson presented a masque entitled "News from the New World," his new world was not the newly found continent of North America, but the new world of science, the world revealed by the telescope of Galileo.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (2005)

Books, World, Knowledge

“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE8/B-Ab.html; later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229 <br class="br">1870s

Beauty

“Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

God, Religion, Way, Search

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.”

Robert Woodrow Wilson (1936) American astronomer

Conclusion of his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/wilson-lecture.html (December 8, 1978) emphasizing that every new experimental discovery increases significantly our knowledge.

“Economics is a social science, not a physical science.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 1, Chapter 1, The Economy and Economics, p. 23
Economics For Everyone (2008)

“While the new physics was developing in the 20th century, the mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although physicists themselves have gone beyond it.
However, the new conception of the universe that has emerged from modern physics does not mean that Newtonian physics is wrong, or that quantum theory, or relativity theory, is right. Modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), p. 93.

World, Nature, Thinking, Reality

“Now, very few [physicians] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Men, Sense

“According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much "variety" as the situation to be controlled.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 2, Chance, Risk and Malice, p. 37.

Law, Nature

“This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer.”

Jack Thompson (attorney) (1951) American activist and disbarred attorney

[2007-04-20, Were video games to blame for massacre?, Winda Benedetti, MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18220228/, 2014-11-18]

Life

“I wanted to be a novelist and a newspaper man… I went to Antioch College and majored in English, at least in the beginning, with the intention of doing something like that…. Antioch had a co-op program so I went to work for the New York Post as a copyboy when I decided I didn't want to be a newspaper man; it was fun, but it wasn't practical. After a while I shifted into philosophy as a major, but I never had any undergraduate training at all in anthropology and, indeed, very little social science outside of economics. I had a lot of economics but nothing else. Anthropology wasn't even taught at Antioch then, although it is now. And except for a political science course or two and lots of economics, I didn't have any social sciences. So I was in literature for at least half the time I was there, the first couple of years, and then I shifted to philosophy, partly because of the influence of a terrific teacher and partly because in a small college you can run out of courses. 'Men I got interested in the same sort of thing I'm interested in now: values, ideas, and so on. Finally, one of my professors said, "Why don't you think about anthropology?"”

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) American anthropologist

That was the first time I had thought seriously about being an anthropologist, and then I began to think about it and I went to Harvard and so on.
"Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction", 1991

Men, Literature, Idea, Thinking

“Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 214

School, Imagination, Idea

“I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

WOL http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102002402?q=collins&p=par

Faith, Religion, Question, Reality

“And I may add that it taught me something about the limitations of the small... orthodox scientist who won't recognize as knowledge, or as reality, any information that doesn't fit into the already existent science.”

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) American psychologist

As quoted in New Pathways In Psychology (1972) by Colin Wilson
1970s and later

Knowledge, Reality

“In the last few decades, a terribly pernicious rumor has been circulated by the press. It claims, exhibiting a level of stupidity heretofore considered impossible, that a human being could crawl through the arteries of a blue whale. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. I do not know why this deleterious rumor has been systematically repeated, but its very existence is an ugly cancer upon the face of science.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973)

Truth, Stupidity

“I believe the earth gets warmer, and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man through the production of CO2 which is a trace gas in the atmosphere and the manmade part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all of the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, you know, moisture in the air. There's a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me, this is an opportunity for the left to create — it's really a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. And so it's been on a warming trend so they said, "Oh, let's take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it's getting warmer." Just like they did in the '70s when it was getting cooler. They needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it's getting cooler. It's just an excuse for more government control of your life. And I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Life, History, Idea, Thinking

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) American speculative fiction writer

As quoted in The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (1964) by James Blish, p. 14

Problem

“The Christian.. cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him. … He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and beliefs have taken up residence in his mind.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 69

“The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous…”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Upanishads–II : Kena and Other Upanishads (2001), p. 355

Knowledge, Effort, Future, Perfection

“"I'm no historian," said Harry. "But morals are morals. What's unethical here and now is unethical anywhere, anytime."
"Kane, you're wrong. It is ethical to execute a man for theft?"
"Of course."
"Did you know that there was once a vastly detailed science of rehabilitation for criminals? It was a branch of psychology, naturally, but it was by far the largest such branch. By the middle of century twenty-one, nearly two-thirds of all criminals could eventually be released as cured."
"That's silly. Why go to all that trouble when the organ banks must have been crying for — Oh. I see. No organ banks."”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 10 : Parlette's Hand

Nature, Cry

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

World, Religion, History, Literature

“Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth - and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and consequences (p. 26)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Truth, Faith, Nature, Success

“If Vice President Al Gore advocated killing rabbits to see if women are pregnant and called it a step forward for science, we'd all think he'd gone 'round the bend. We don't need to do that sort of thing anymore, we'd say. We have better, kinder ways.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

The Washington Times, 1999 August 29
1990s

Women, Way, Thinking

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 385 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=402&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image <br class="br">The Descent of Man (1871)

Pleasure, Truth, Error, Support

Quotes about science page 10

Quotes about science
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