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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:

Philosophy is the science of estimating values.

Manly P. Hall The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)

We suffer a great deal today from the bogus certainties and precisions of the pseudo-sciences which include all the social sciences including economics.

John James Cowperthwaite

Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

Lionel Robbins An Essay on the nature and significance of Economic Science (1932)

The aim of management science is to display the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, and this must include all the circumstances.

Anthony Stafford Beer Management Science (1968)

I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women and children as the most diabolical use of science.

Mahatma Gandhi

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

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

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

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

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Skin in the Game (2018)

God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease.

Benito Mussolini

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World (1925)

However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.

Lewis Mumford Technics and Civilization (1934)

When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1956)

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

E. O. Wilson Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.

E. O. Wilson Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)

Freedom of expression must also bow to the necessity for clear communication, as many of science fiction’s failed experiments of the sixties demonstrate.

Roger Zelazny Unicorn Variations (1983)

It makes no sense at all if people consider the one who lacks knowledge and science as a prosperous person.

Ja'far al-Sadiq

Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable.

Starhawk The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.

Sergey Brin

The facts of science always imply a theoretical, which means a symbolic, element.

Ernst Cassirer An Essay on Man (1944)

Science is the last step in man's mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture.

Ernst Cassirer An Essay on Man (1944)

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