Quotes by Women Scientists

Marie Curie

Lise Meitner

Rachel Carson

Irène Joliot-Curie

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Dorothy Hodgkin

Barbara McClintock

A great discovery does not leap completely achieved from the brain of the scientist, as Minerva sprang, all panoplied, from the head of Jupiter; it is the fruit of accumulated preliminary work.

There are many reasons, some of them so deep-seated emotionally as to be very difficult of expression. Possibly the simplest explanation is that we started along this road … and I cannot stop until I have won.

Jeannette Piccard

While the biological properties of deoxypentose nucleic acid suggest a molecular structure containing great complexity, X-ray diffraction studies described here...show the basic molecular configuration has great simplicity.

Rosalind Franklin

We bequeath to you, the next generation, our knowledge but also our problems. While we still live, let us join hands, hearts and minds to work together for their solution so that your world will be better than ours and the world of your children even better.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.

Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.

All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

Barbara Brennan

Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew - seeing them freshly - old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.

There is inherent in the human mind a desire to find an explanation - or as some would prefer to have it called, a description - of the phenomena of nature, by means of speculations concerning the ultimate constitution of matter.

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!

Kathleen Lonsdale

Some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.

Ellen Swallow Richards

In the labs, the young make things move, and the older ones follow like parents evolving with their children.

Catherine Bréchignac

Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

When I made the decision to transition, I honestly had no idea what it would be like for me to live as female. The only thing I knew for sure was that pretending to be male was slowly killing me.

Scientists who do deny their politics—who claim to be objective and unemotional about gender while living in a world where even boats and automobiles are identified by sex—are fooling both themselves and the public at large.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better.

The study of nature is a limitless field, the most fascinating adventure in the world.

Margaret Morse Nice

The study of how substances alter gene expression is part of the field of epigenetics. Some chemical exposures appear to turn on and turn off genes in ways that disregulate cell growth and predispose for cancer. From this perspective, our genes are less the command-and-control masters of our cells and more like the keys of piano, with the environment as the hands of the pianist.

Sandra Steingraber

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...

Beta decay was... like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it.

Chien-Shiung Wu

When you know you're right, you don't care what others think. You know sooner or later it will come out in the wash.

Barbara McClintock

Nature is a deep reality and whether we understand it or not it is true and elemental.

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

There are now more than 4,000 places in the sea around the world that have some kind of protection. The bad news: You have to look hard to find them. What you find instead is destructive fishing, mining, gas and oil exploration.

A great many people say we have language and imagination to posit creators, interveners, and agencies that we can't actually prove. And yet some people experience God within them—these experiences are not drawn-up hypotheses. It's possible those of us who don't feel God within them have deficient brains that aren't capable of such experiences; or alternatively, the people who experience these things have brains that somehow create them. As near as I can tell, the jury is out on that. I may be a non-theist who doesn't include a god concept in my religious orientation because I have an incompetent brain, or perhaps theists have brains giving them inaccurate information.

Ursula Goodenough

We are all of us walking communities of bacteria.
The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape
made of tiny living beings.