Quotes about Science

Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together.

Abandoning science is the road back into poverty and backwardness.

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality—where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But this isn't enough to explain its popularity.

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.

The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community—as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and said, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed'?

As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, "In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy?