Bertrand Russell - Science Quotes

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The power of using abstractions is the essence of intellect, and with every increase in abstraction the intellectual triumphs of science are enhanced.

Bertrand Russell
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Bertrand Russell
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did

Bertrand Russell
When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

Bertrand Russell
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Bertrand Russell
The momentary state of science that may change tomorrow...

Bertrand Russell
The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form — in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality — has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life.

Bertrand Russell
Science has always prided itself on being empirical and believing only what could be verified.

Bertrand Russell
A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.

Bertrand Russell
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

Bertrand Russell
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Bertrand Russell
Physics, owing to the simplicity of its subject matter, has reached a higher state of development than any other science.

Bertrand Russell
The prudent man of science acquires a certain instinct as to the kind of uses which may be made of present scientific beliefs without incurring the danger of complete and utter refutation from the modifications likely to be introduced by subsequent discoveries.

Bertrand Russell
We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.

Bertrand Russell
While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

Bertrand Russell
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
The aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature.

Bertrand Russell
In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

Bertrand Russell
The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

Bertrand Russell
In former days, men sold themselves to the Devil to acquire magical powers. Nowadays they acquire those powers from science, and find themselves compelled to become devils. There is no hope for the world unless power can be tamed, and brought into the service, not of this or that group of fanatical tyrants, but of the whole human race, white and yellow and black, fascist and communist and democrat; for science has made it inevitable that all must live or all must die.

Bertrand Russell
A religious creed differs from a scientific theory in claiming to embody eternal and absolutely certain truth, whereas science is always tentative, expecting that modification in its present theories will sooner or later be found necessary, and aware that its method is one which is logically incapable of arriving at a complete and final demonstration.

Bertrand Russell
A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance.

Bertrand Russell
The history of science abundantly proves that a body of abstract propositions - even if, as in the case of conic sections, it remains two thousand years without effect upon daily life - may yet, at any moment, be used to cause a revolution in the habitual thoughts and occupations of every citizen.

Bertrand Russell
A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.

Bertrand Russell