Comparable to remarks of William Masters, in "Two Sex Researchers on the Firing Line" LIFE magazine (24 June 1966), p. 49: "Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built."
Variants:
Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.
As quoted in Futurehype: The Myths of Technology Change (2009) by Robert B. Seidensticker
Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently. Should the knife have not been developed?
As quoted in Science & Society (2012) by Peter Daempfle, Ch. 6, p. 97<!-- also in Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience, and Just Plain Bunk: How to Tell the Difference (2013) by Peter Daempfle, Ch. 9, p. 166 -->
Responsible Scientific Investigation and Application (1976)
Context: One of the most disconcerting issues of our time lies in the fact that modern science, along with miracle drugs and communications satellites, has also produced nuclear bombs. What makes it even worse, science has utterly failed to provide an answer on how to cope with them. As a result, science and scientists have often been blamed for the desperate dilemma in which mankind finds itself today.
Science, all by itself, has no moral dimension. The same poison-containing drug which cures when taken in small doses, may kill when taken in excess. The same nuclear chain reaction that produces badly needed electrical energy when harnessed in a reactor, may kill thousands when abruptly released in an atomic bomb. Thus it does not make sense to ask a biochemist or a nuclear physicist whether his research in the field of toxic substances or nuclear processes is good or bad for mankind. In most cases the scientist will be fully aware of the possibility of an abuse of his discoveries, but aside from his innate scientific curiosity he will be motivated by a deep-seated hope and belief that something of value for his fellow man may emerge from his labors.
The same applies to technology, through which most advances in the natural sciences are put to practical use.
Quotes about cure
page 7
"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.
It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Model Prisons (March 1, 1850)
Context: Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are two ways of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs, accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable, incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible. Not a very noble class of citizens these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and servants: their method of proceeding, in these times, is also very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance restored, and maintained again; thus,—or by what conceivable method? On these terms they, for their part, embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water; desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one; and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there is not the smallest hope of its misery going,—that not for all the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then!
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!
Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance
Context: When a physician sees that his patient's strength is being exhausted so rapidly by the intensity of his agony that he will die of exhaustion before the medical processes inaugurated have a chance to do their curative work, he administers an opiate. But a good physician is always loath to do so, knowing that one of the influences of the opiate is to interfere with and defeat the medical processes themselves. He never does it except as a choice of evils. It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.
Fragment xxxii.
Golden Sayings of Epictetus, Fragments
“It is not easy to devise a cure for such a state of things”
in a review of William Herschel's A Treatise on Sound, Quarterly Review, Vol. 44, No. 88 (January-February 1831), p. 476 http://books.google.com/books?id=742veo7MzswC&printsec=titlepage#PPA476,M1.
also quoted by Brewster himself in his Treatise on Optics http://books.google.com/books?id=opYAAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPR4,M1 and by Dionysius Lardner as frontispiece or presentation of his works (see for example: Popular lectures on science and art http://books.google.com/books?id=uZ9LAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3, Cabinet Cyclopaedia http://books.google.com/books?id=5T43oHhqyxUC&pg=RA1-PT7).
Context: It is not easy to devise a cure for such a state of things (the declining taste for science). The most obvious remedy is to provide the educated classes with a series of works on popular and practical science, freed from mathematical symbols and technical terms, written in simple and perspicuous language, and illustrated by facts and experiments which are level to the capacity of ordinary minds.
Source: The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), p. 131
Statement of Purpose: Gay Liberation Front (Dec. 1969)
"The Master Illusion" in the The American Mercury (March 1925), p. 319
1920s
Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
Letter to Walton Newbold (2 June 1930), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 538
1930s
Maiden speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1970/apr/20/budget-resolutions-and-economic-situation#column_83 in the House of Commons (3 June 1948)
1940s
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Address to the Democratic National Convention (July 19, 1988)
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 1.
White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)
Yevgeni Chazov, spoken in a special session of the Central Committee one day after Chernenko died.
Letters from New York https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdid=book-dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdot=1 (1841-1843), p. 206, Letter XXVIII, 29 Sep 1842
1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 5: The Passes
My Religion / Light in My Darkness, Ch 6 (1927)
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science
On the 2008 Chinese milk scandal
"If the Chinese government tries to play down this incident, there will be no social stability in China, let alone harmony... It will mean that this government has lost the most basic level of trust."[7] -
"Uproar Over China Milk Scandal". Radio Free Asia. September 23, 2008.
2000s
Regarding the role of experiment and observation, Ibn Hazm: Kitab al-fisal fi’l-milal wa-l-ahwa wa-l-nihal, 5 parts in two vols; Cairo, 1899 and 1903; Vol I, p. 72.
The Faith that Heals (1910)
If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
Optimism (1903)
Speech to a banquet of the Merchant Taylors' Company, London (10 May 1886), quoted in The Times (11 May 1886), p. 12
1880s
The Daily Herald (7 October 1955), quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (1979), p. 360
Opposition MP
Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones
Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XV The Essential Science of Breathing
Source: Rectorial address ("The present decline of Parliamentary government in Great Britain") to Edinburgh University (5 March 1931), quoted in The Times (6 March 1931), p. 19
2020, March 2020
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/23/unemployment-1#column_1202 in the House of Commons (23 November 1971)
1970s
Speech at the 58th session of the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts) (2003)
“An old truth asserts that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Speech at the 49th session of the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts) (1994)
“Choose with cure who reaches and warms your heart.”
Original: Scegliete con cura chi raggiunge e riscalda il vostro cuore.
Original: prevale.net