Scientific Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work.

I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.

G. K. Chesterton

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art.... In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

It is impossible. It would be contrary to scientific spirit.... Physicists always publish their researches completely. If our discovery has a commercial future, that is an accident by which we must not profit. And radium is going to be of use in treating disease... It seems to me impossible to take advantage of that.

Our Program is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world outlook. An explanation of our Program, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.

A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

Albert Einstein

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Mind you, that you have a sound scientific theory to correlate your observations at the bedside. Mere experience by itself is nothing. If I take my dog to the bedside with me, he sees what I see. But he learns nothing from it. Why? Because he's not a scientific dog.

George Bernard Shaw

Organization is not something fundamentally mystical and unamenable to scientific attack, but rather the basic problem confronting the biologist... It is for us to investigate the nature of this biological organization, not to abandon it to the metaphysicians because the rules of physics do not seem to apply to it.

A prominent literary writer recently spoke of the electron as "only the latest scientific hypothesis which will in its turn give way to the abra-ca-da-bra of tomorrow."

Robert Andrews Millikan

It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.

Thomas Henry Huxley

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe — one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.

Charles Lindbergh

The hope of getting some argument or theory to share our responsibilities is, I believe, one of the basic motives of "scientific" ethics.

By the scientific process there is effected the elaboration of a beautiful orderliness from the midst of a chaos of sensations.

Samuel Morison Brown

I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can't justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, So bloody what? The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.

It is important, therefore, to understand at the outset the simplicity of this book - what it can accomplish and what it cannot. What it does try to do is to isolate certain psychological factors and to demonstrate rigorously by quantitative scientific methods that these factors are generally important in economic development.

David McClelland

Scientific theories, if they are not falsified, for ever remain hypotheses or conjectures.

Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied.

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Decision tree - The most picturesque of all the allegedly scientific aids to making decisions. The analyst charts all the possible outcomes of different options, and charts all the latters' outcomes, too. This produces a series of stems and branches (hence the tree). Each of the chains of events is given a probability and a monetary value.

The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator, have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination!

Michael Faraday

The beauty of science and the nature of scientific revelations constitute part of the modern theologian's perspective and toolbox.

If we are not to live in embarrassed dread in the century ahead, we will have to understand the mathematical ideas that lie behind the scientific advances that are shaping the modern world.