scientific quotes

My girls suffered during this month or so, so did my seminars & lectures & my poetry even. To be a critic, ah, how deeper and more scientific.

-John originally John Allyn Smith Berryman
  'Olympus'.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief'must be discarded and replaced by 'thescientific method'.

- Max Born
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worryabout the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to do the work.

- Richard P(hillips) Feynman
  Nobel lecture.

Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

- (Arthur) Eric Rowton Gill
'Art'. Collected in Essays (1948).

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs especially if the frogs are decapitatedand thaton the other handany doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings^with heads on their shouldersmust be benighted and superstitious.

-William James
  Pragmatism.

In order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizationsand influencethemfromwithin. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capableand skilled in the practice of his own profession.

-PopeJohn XXIII originally Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli
  Pacem in Terris,10  Apr.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

- Claude Le  vi-Strauss
  The Raw and the Cooked (translated by  John and Doreen Weightman1983).

The scientific attitude implies†the postulate of objectivitythat is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan; that there is no intention in the universe.

-Jacques Monod
  Le Hasard et la Nece  ssite  .

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at thenew truthwith handsblood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.

-Jose Ortega y Gasset
  The Revolt of the Masses.

Scientific discoveryand scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of them without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

- Max Karl Ernst Planck
  Where is Science Going? pt.4 (translated byJames Murphy).

If we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics† But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness† Man, then, can not be happy through science buttoday he canmuch less be happy without it.

- (Jules) Henri Poincare 
  TheValue of Science.

Every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.

- Sir Karl Raimund Popper
  The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

- Sir Karl Raimund Popper
  The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), appendix to1959 edition.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

- Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
  Interview in the New Statesman, 24 May.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

- Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
  'Can a Scientific Community Be Stable?', Lloyd Roberts lecture to the Royal Society of Medicine, 29 Nov.

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.

- George Bernard Shaw
  BB (Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington). The Doctor's Dilemma, act1.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis.By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

- D(onald) M(itchell) Thomas
TheWhite Hotel, author's note.

Village cricket spread fast through the land.In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watcheach ball a potential crisis.

- George Macaulay Trevelyan
Quoted in Helen Exley Cricket Quotations (1992).

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.

- Norbert Wiener
  The Human Use of Human Beings.

The Governer was strong upon The Regulation Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called, And left a little tract.

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
  The Ballad of Reading Gaol, pt.3, stanza 3.

We are redefining and restating our socialism in terms of thescientific revolution† The Britain that will be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

- (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
  Labour Party Conference,1Oct. His phrase has since been memorably rendered as 'the white heat of the technological revolution'.