Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

- Fritjof Capra

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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Observations always involve theory.

- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Anton Chekhov

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There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

- Anton Chekhov

Arthur C. Clarke

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When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

- Arthur C. Clarke

Marie Curie

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I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

- Marie Curie

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

- Marie Curie

John Dewey

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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

- John Dewey

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

- John Dewey

Will Durant

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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

- Will Durant

Albert Einstein

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Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

- Albert Einstein

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

- Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

- Albert Einstein

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Richard P. Feynman

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I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

- Richard P. Feynman

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

- Richard P. Feynman

Martin H. Fischer

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Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

- Martin H. Fischer

Not fact-finding, but attainment to philosophy is the aim of science.

- Martin H. Fischer

The great men of science are supreme artists.

- Martin H. Fischer

Abraham Flexner

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Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them.

- Abraham Flexner

Stephen Jay Gould

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In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

- Stephen Jay Gould

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

- Stephen Jay Gould

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

- Stephen Jay Gould

Hippocrates

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There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

- Hippocrates

Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

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Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

- Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

Science is the topography of ignorance.

- Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

Aldous Huxley

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Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.

- Aldous Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley

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But the great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact - which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers...

- Thomas Henry Huxley

Science is simply common sense at its best.

- Thomas Henry Huxley

The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

- Thomas Henry Huxley

William James

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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

- William James

Immanuel Kant

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In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

- Immanuel Kant

Martin Luther, Jr. King

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Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

- Martin Luther, Jr. King

Walter Lippmann

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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

- Walter Lippmann

Karl Marx

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Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

- Karl Marx

Henry Louis Mencken

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It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

- Henry Louis Mencken

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

- Henry Louis Mencken

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

- Henry Louis Mencken

Louis Pasteur

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There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

- Louis Pasteur

Robert M. Pirsig

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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Max Planck

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A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

- Max Planck

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

- Max Planck

Henri Poincaré

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Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

- Henri Poincaré

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

- Henri Poincaré

Robert Quillen

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If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.

- Robert Quillen

Jean Rostand

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Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

- Jean Rostand

Bertrand Russell

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Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

- Bertrand Russell

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.

- Bertrand Russell

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

- Bertrand Russell

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

S. Sachs

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Physics is geometric proof on steroids.

- S. Sachs

Carl Sagan

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I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

- Carl Sagan

George Santayana

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Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

- George Santayana

George Bernard Shaw

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Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.

- George Bernard Shaw

Adam Smith

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Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

- Adam Smith

Lewis Thomas

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The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

- Lewis Thomas

Henry David Thoreau

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Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.

- Henry David Thoreau

Henry J. Tillman

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If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

- Henry J. Tillman

Mark Twain

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There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

- Mark Twain

Miguel de Unamuno

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Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

- Miguel de Unamuno