American Scientist Quotes

Richard Feynman

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Linus Pauling

Rachel Carson

James Dewey Watson

Albert A. Michelson

Robert Andrews Millikan

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set firm foundations for further developments. The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.
Further, science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is often much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone.

Science is curiosity, discovering things and asking why.

Victor Weisskopf

The fossil record says eloquently that profuse evolution had indeed occurred over millions of years, but the data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms.

Hampton L. Carson (biologist)

Anyone who wishes to grow over their lifetime needs criticism.

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework.

Melvin Schwartz

If the wolf is to survive, the wolf haters must be outnumbered. They must be outshouted, out financed, and out voted. Their narrow and biased attitude must be outweighed by an attitude based on an understanding of natural processes.

I don't know exactly what you guys want to do, but let me tell you why you should do it with fruit flies.

Eric F. Wieschaus

At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always.

Val Logsdon Fitch

I liked to use my face mask more than the diving helmet for most occasions. I was learning to hold my breath longer now and could go down almost as deep without the helmet which limited my movements...

Understanding natural science has been, historically, an important source of mathematical inspiration. So it is frustrating that, at the outset of the new century, the main framework used by physicists for describing the laws of nature is not accessible mathematically.

Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science.

Stuart Kauffman

In attempting to discover traces of a science in earliest historic times, one must first disabuse his mind of the idea that he will find it in anything like the elaborated modern form in which he knows it. These natural sciences are the result of a long process of evolution, and the primal form will probably prove a very much disguised one.

Francis Preston Venable

The awkward richness of possibilities seems to shatter any possible coherent theory of simplicity...

Lawrence B. Slobodkin

Education is habit-forming rather than information; illumination rather than indoctrination, inspiration rather than compulsion.

Edwin Grant Conklin

For me, the creative process, first of all, requires a good nine hours of sleep a night. Second, it must not be pushed by the need to produce practical applications.

William Lipscomb

all the light and beauty, all the grandeur and majesty of the universe are unraveled only in the tiny retinas of human beings.

Varadaraja V. Raman

All this stuff about traveling around the universe... belongs back where it came from, on the cereal box.

Edward Mills Purcell

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The arrow of time, through the defining role it plays in everyday life and its intimate link with the origin of the universe, lies at a singular threshold between the reality we experience and the more refined reality cutting-edge science seeks to uncover.

Among nonclassical ions the ratio of conceptual difficulty to molecular weight reaches a maximum with the cyclopropylcarbinyl-cyclobutyl system.

Paul Doughty Bartlett

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

We can put it down as one of the principles learned from the history of science that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts.

James Bryant Conant

Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

Concepts are games we play with our heads; methods are games we play with our hands, which at times are so handy they can be played without a head.

Frank Edwin Egler