Skip to content

Science Quotes

Asimov, Jacob Bronowski, Einstein, Arthur Eddington and Carl Sagan lead the page. The most-sourced writer is Henri Poincaré, with several passages from Science and Hypothesis (1901) and The Value of Science (1905), including the one about doubting everything and believing everything being two equally convenient ways to avoid thinking.

Two entries are flagged. “Etymology is a science in which vowels signify nothing at all, and consonants very little” is credited to Voltaire as disputed, and the notes cite two scholarly articles on where the saying comes from. “Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences” is credited to Galileo and flagged misattributed.

Random quote on Science

Most quoted on science:

Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences, even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws.

Alfred Tarski

Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)

David Sloan Wilson A Life Informed by Evolution (2022)

In this sense, it is possible to say that science, utopia and revolution are all animated by a deeply religious view of time and history, where what was announced at the beginning is ultimately realised.

Umberto Galimberti

I think there really is a place for science in literature and I think that may be increasing

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity (2016)

Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.

Marshall McLuhan Playboy Interview (1969)

Ibn al-Haytham was the first person ever to set down the rules of science. -S01E05

Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)

The whole of science... is a self-correcting mechanism. ...[S]cientific journals publish ...corrections to previous publications.., to past mistakes or past lacuna.

Yuval Noah Harari The Collapse of Truth (2025)

I had this impression from the media that science was for old white guys, people who looked like Einstein, that it wasn’t for people like me ...

Jennifer Doudna

That a formal science like algebra, the creation of our abstract thought, should thus, in a sense, dictate the laws of its own being, is very remarkable. It has required the experience of centuries for us to realize the full force of this appeal.

George Ballard Mathews

most top science and math students don't participate in such national contests.

Norman Matloff

I was born to consecrate myself to the languages and sciences, and, if I had to choose between occupying a political position, I would rather be a president or minister to that of an Emperor.

Pedro II of Brazil

I often think about maps, because so much of what I do involves measurement. To explain features or processes, you must first describe them. In science the description must be precise and reproducible to be accepted, and this requires measurement.

Ellen E. Wohl

The doctrine that there is as much science in a subject as... mathematics in it, or as much... measurement or 'precision' in it, rests upon... misunderstanding.

Karl Popper Realism and the Aim of Science (1983)

This is what separates science from other disciplines—a scientific hypothesis must make specific testable predictions. ...[Y]ou have to look hard for consequences that you can check for, and especially... that you can prove wrong.

Helen Czerski Storm in a Teacup (2016)

Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.

Thomas Szasz The Second Sin (1973)

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

Raymond Chandler

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov

The modern clergyman has acquired in his study of the science which I believe is called exegesis an astonishing facility for explaining things away.

W. Somerset Maugham The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Stephen Jay Gould Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Related topics