Quotes about scientist
page 11

Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
Vikram Sarabhai photo
Vikram Sarabhai photo

“If he was not satisfied with the work of any engineer or scientist, he immediately told him his fault. He was very positive at such moments.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

About, Pride Of The Nation: Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Tucker Carlson photo

“It’s obvious we need more scientists and skilled engineers. What we’re getting instead are waves of poor people with a high school education or less. They’re nice people; nobody doubts that. But as an economic matter, this is insane. It’s indefensible, so nobody tries to defend it. It’s indefensible, so no one even tries to defend it.Instead, our leaders demand you shut up and accept it. We’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, dirtier and more divided.”

Tucker Carlson (1969) American political commentator

Immigration is a form of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins. So, we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans.
December 13, 2018 on Tucker Carlson Tonight ([December 14, 2018, Tucker Carlson: Why no one ever makes the economic case for mass immigration, Tucker, Carlson, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-why-no-one-ever-makes-the-economic-case-for-mass-immigration]; [The New York Times, August 20, 2019, Hsu, Tiffany, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-advertisers.html]; [Tucker Carlson said immigration makes America ‘dirtier.’ So an advertiser took action, The Washington Post, Erik, Wemple, w:Erik Wemple, December 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/15/tucker-carlson-said-immigration-makes-america-dirtier-so-an-advertiser-took-action/]; [Advertisers recoil as Tucker Carlson says immigrants make US ‘dirtier’, The Guardian, Luke, O'Neil, December 18, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/18/tucker-carlson-immigrants-poorer-dirtier-advertisers-pull-out]; [Advertisers bail on Fox News' Tucker Carlson over immigration comments, NBC News, December 17, 2018, Tim, Stelloh, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/advertisers-bail-fox-news-tucker-carlson-over-immigration-comments-n949171]; [Red Lobster stops advertising on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show after he made controversial comments about women's pay and immigrants, Kate, Taylor, Eliza, Relman, January 7, 2019, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/red-lobster-cuts-advertising-on-tucker-carlsons-fox-news-show-2019-1]; [September 17, 2019, Is Tucker Carlson the Most Important Pundit in America?, Park, MacDougald, New York, The Intelligencer, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/is-tucker-carlson-the-most-important-pundit-in-america.html])
2010s, 2018

Sabine Hossenfelder photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
W.E.B. Du Bois photo
Jerzy Vetulani photo

“He was a man of contradictions: genius, loyal, virtuous. But also uncompromising and even brazen. Beloved and unbearable at the same time. A controversial scientist, and just a good man.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Maria Mazurek, journalist and co-author of several popular science books with Vetulani. Odszedł profesor Jerzy Vetulani, wybitny naukowiec z Krakowa http://www.gazetakrakowska.pl/wiadomosci/krakow/a/odszedl-profesor-jerzy-vetulani-wybitny-naukowiec-z-krakowa,11966432/ (in Polish), Gazeta Krakowska, 8th April 2017.

Alastair Reynolds photo

“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?”

“We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question.

Turquoise Days, Chapter 2 (pp. 240-241)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Lloyd Kaufman photo
Bill Nye photo

“Nye grew up in a science-minded family in Washington, D. C. His mom was a math and science whiz. His dad manufactured sundials. His grandfather was an organic scientist. Fittingly, one of young Bill’s favorite hangouts was the original Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which looked like a small Quonset hut.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Mark Bennett, Bill Nye still rocking science - TV personality making weekend appearance in town to help open Children's Museum, The Tribune-Star, Terre Haute, Indiana, September 24, 2010]

Jayant Narlikar photo
Jagadish Chandra Bose photo
M. S. Swaminathan photo

“Dr. Swaminathan is a living legend. His contributions to Agricultural Science have made an indelible mark on food production in India and elsewhere in the developing world. By any standards, he will go into the annals of history as a world scientist of rare distinction.”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

Stated by Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the United Nations on the occasion of award of the First World Food Prize. Quoted here World Food Prize, Prof. Swaminathan, 1987 World Food Prize Laureate, 25 November 2013, World Food Prize Organization http://www.worldfoodprize.org/Laureates/Past/1987.htm,

C. V. Raman photo

“Dr. C. V. Raman was the greatest scientist of modern India and one of the greatest intellects our country has produced in its long history. His mind was like the diamond, which he studied and explained. His life’s work consisted in throwing light upon the nature of lights, and the world honoured him in many ways for the new knowledge which he won for science.”

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

Indira Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of India quoted in [Cahn, R.W., The Coming of Materials Science, http://books.google.com/books?id=CCmJMr_K5NIC&pg=PA234, 16 March 2001, Elsevier, 978-0-08-052942-4, 272]

Shaun Micallef photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Al Gore photo
John Nash photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Richard Feynman photo

“The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Attributed to Feynman, many times, by the British historian of science Brian Cox.
Disputed and/or attributed

Steven Crowder photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“Here is the bottom line. When we are dealing with this crisis, we need to listen to the scientists, to the researchers, to the medical folks, not politicians. We need an emergency response to this crisis and we need it now.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2020-03-12
Now Is the Time for Solidarity: Bernie Sanders Addresses Health and Economic Crisis Facing US as Coronavirus Spreads
Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/12/now-time-solidarity-bernie-sanders-addresses-health-and-economic-crisis-facing-us
2020

Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo

“Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves.
When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Ivan Pavlov photo

“Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you never can fly. Without them your "theories" are vain efforts.”

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) Russian physiologist

Bequest of Pavlov to the Academic Youth of His Country. Science, Vol. 83, Issue 2155, pg. 369 (1936)

Richard Dawkins photo

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

Source: Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Ch. 1 : The Anaesthetic of Familiarity; Dawkins is reported to have stated that this passage will be read at his funeral; it is often quoted with an extension which does not occur in any thus-far-checked editions of the book: "We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Dylan Moran photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
Peter Hotez photo
William S. Burroughs photo

“No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.”

Source: The Western Lands (1987), p. 8

Stephen Baxter photo
Stephen Baxter photo

“The secret of a Scientist is not what he knows. It’s what he asks.”

Source: Raft (1991), Chapter 4 (p. 45)

Arthur C. Clarke photo

“Though I've often made fun of the scientists, they’ve freed us forever from the stagnation that was overtaking your race.”

The Road to the Sea, p. 298
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

Benjamin Creme photo
Louis Pasteur photo

“I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence of today cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that in ten thousand years, one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life? You move from matter to life because your current intelligence, so limited compared to what will be the future intelligence of the naturalist, tells you that things cannot be understood otherwise. If you want to be among the scientific minds, what only counts is that you will have to get rid of a priori reasoning and ideas, and you will have to do necessary deductions not giving more confidence than we should to deductions from wild speculation.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Original: (fr) La génération spontanée, je la cherche sans la découvrir depuis vingt ans. Non, je ne la juge pas impossible. Mais quoi donc vous autorise à vouloir qu'elle ait été l'origine de la vie? Vous placez la matière avant la vie et vous faites la matière existante de toute éternité. Qui vous dit que, le progrès incessant de la science n'obligera pas les savants, qui vivront dans un siècle, dans mille ans, dans dix mille ans... à affirmer que la vie a été de toute éternité et non la matière.? Vous passez de la matière à la vie parce que votre intelligence actuelle, si bornée par rapport à ce que sera l'intelligence des naturalistes futurs, vous dit qu'elle ne peut comprendre autrement les choses. Qui m'assure que dans dix mille ans on ne considérera pas que c'est de la vie qu'on croira impossible de ne pas passer à la matière? Si vous voulez être au nombre des esprits scientifiques, s, qui seuls comptent, il faut vous débarrasser des idées et des raisonnements a priori et vous en tenir aux déductions nécessaires des faits établis et ne pas accorder plus de confiance qu'il ne faut aux déductions de pures hypothèses."

As quoted in Pasteur et la philosophie (2004), by Patrice Pinet, p. 63

Partially quoted in Louis Pasteur : Free Lance of Science (1950) by René Dubos, p 396

Newton Lee photo
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. photo

“Thimerosal is a controversial mercury based (sic) vaccine preservative that research scientists and vaccine safety advocates have connected to the epidemic of brain disorders in children.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

Source: " Why Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Get Brain Science So Wrong? https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2015/07/21/why-does-robert-f-kennedy-jr-get-brain-science-so-wrong/#451fa6e83a13" by Emily Willingham, forbes.com (July 21, 2015).

Anatoly Antonov photo
Guy P. Harrison photo
J.B. Priestley photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Jon Ossoff photo

“Social scientists … have begun to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.””

They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication. … But perhaps there has not been a failure in communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. … We must ask the question, “Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?”
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 10-11.

Thomas Kuhn photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Bill Gates photo

“Most governments take advantage of their scientists and listen to them. They don't undermine them and attack them.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

As quoted in "Bill Gates slams U.S. on Covid: Most governments listen to their scientists, not attack them" (14 October 2020) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/bill-gates-slams-us-on-covid-most-governments-listen-to-scientists.html
2020s

David Mitchell photo

“I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold.”

"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 133
Cloud Atlas (2004), Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Part 1)

Michael Nielsen photo

“We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from "real" work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science.”

Michael Nielsen (1974) Australian and Canadian physicist and writer (b.1974)

The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088. In The Wall Street Journal. October 29, 2011.

Karl Popper photo

“Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer—whether animal or man—perishes with his false beliefs.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Source: Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject (1967)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Christopher Reeve photo

“Perhaps it is my job to offend some scientists. I'm not asking them to be reckless or unprofessional, but I do want to reinforce a sense of urgency.”

Christopher Reeve (1952–2004) actor, director, producer, screenwriter

Source: As quoted I Nigel Williams, “Reeve's stem-cell legacy” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982204007973, “Current Biology” , Volume 14, Issue 21, 9 November 2004, Pages R907-R908

“Does female orgasm have an evolutionary function? Ironically, scientists have yet to come to a satisfying conclusion about this matter.”

Source: The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve (2018), p. 58

Ricardo Galvão photo
Richard Feynman photo
Edward Said photo

“More to the point, one cannot understand The Holocaust without understanding the intentions, ideology, and mechanisms that were put in place in 1933. The eugenics movement may have come to a catastrophic crescendo with the Hitler regime, but the political movement, the world-view, the ideology, and the science that aspired to breed humans like prized horses began almost 100 years earlier. More poignantly, the ideology and those legal and governmental mechanisms of a eugenic world-view inevitably lead back to the British and American counterparts that Hitler’s scientists collaborated with. Posterity must gain understanding of the players that made eugenics a respectable scientific and political movement, as Hitler’s regime was able to evade wholesale condemnation in those critical years between 1933 and 1943 precisely because eugenics had gained international acceptance. As this book will evidence, Hitler’s infamous 1933 laws mimicked those already in place in the United States, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada.
So what is this scientific and political movement that for 100 years aspired to breed humans like dogs or horses? Eugenics is quite literally, as defined by its principal proponents, an attempt at “directing evolution” by controlling any aspect of human existence that affects human heredity. From its onset, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the man credited with the creation of the science of eugenics, knew that the cause of eugenics had to be observed with religious fervor and dedication. As the quote on the opening pages of this book illustrates, a eugenicist must “intrude, intrude, intrude.” A vigilant control over anything and everything that affects the gene pool is essential to eugenics. The policies could not allow for the individual to enjoy self-government or self-determination any more than a horse breeder can allow the animals to determine whom to breed with. One simply cannot breed humans like horses without imbuing the state with the level of control a farmer has over its livestock, not only controlling procreation, but also the diet, access to medical services, and living conditions.”

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

Daniel Dennett photo