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.

There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

It was a wonderful mess at that time. Wonderful! Just great! It was so confusing — physics at its best, when everything is confused and you know something important lies just around the corner.

I see a tremendous amount of intricacy in the world and we have probably only begun to scratch at the surface of its intricacy.

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

Going to the moon is not a matter of physics but of economics.

Epidemiology is like a bikini: what is revealed is interesting; what is concealed is crucial.

The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.

Massimo Pigliucci

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.

No one can predict how far we shall be enabled by means of our limited intelligence to penetrate into the mysteries of a universe immeasurably vast and wonderful; nevertheless, each step in advance is certain to bring new blessings to humanity and new inspiration to greater endeavor.

Theodore William Richards

Chemists think in the highly visual nanoscopic world of atoms and molecules, but they work in the tangible world of macroscopic laboratory apparatus. These two approaches to the chemical sciences cannot be divorced.

David W. Oxtoby

There is not a "pure" science. By this I mean that physics impinges on astronomy, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology on the other. And not only does each support neighbors, but derives sustenance from them. The same can be said of chemistry. Biology is, perhaps, the example par excellence today of an "impure" Science.

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

Lawrence B. Slobodkin

Mathematics is not a complete and perfected body of doctrine which one goes to seek in the scriptures whenever one has need of it.

The numerical description of a vector requires three numbers, but nothing prevents us from using a single number for its symbolical designation. An algebra or analytical method in which a single letter or other expression is used to specify a vector may be called a vector algebra or vector analysis.

Josiah Willard Gibbs

Recall some of the lectures you may have heard recently. Did you always know why the research had been done? Was it clear what problem was being illuminated by the data presented?

John Alexander Moore

There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass.... Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months.

I have just joined the Board of the Population Institute because I am convinced that early stabilization of the world's population is important for the attainment of this objective.

Aging and death do seem to be what Nature has planned for us. But what if we have other plans?

Bernard L. Strehler

We know light best in its diluted form: a gentle rain of photons falling from the sun that illuminates and warms. More concentrated, light is a furnace and a terror.

George M. Whitesides

The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

We look to medical research to discover remedial measures to insure better health and more happiness for mankind.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Life isn't about the final destination or the accomplishments and accolades; it's about the journey and the opportunities for learning—and how we grow as a result.

If I want a word, I make it. I don't like combustion. It's too quiet. I have some stuff in a state of combustication.

Julius Sumner Miller