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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:

If people realize the value of science and knowledge, they will sacrifice themselves for earning it.

Ali Zayn al-Abidin

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Carroll Quigley The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (1979)

Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true.

Carroll Quigley The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (1979)

In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose.

François Arago Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859)

To contribute usefully to the advance of science, one must sometimes not disdain from undertaking simple verifications.

Léon Foucault

Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.

Bernard Crick

In science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence.

Peter L. Berger Invitation to Sociology (1963)

Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.

Brian Campbell Vickery B.C. Vickery (1997)

Science is a social phenomenon, and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit of injury it confers on the community.

Hermann Rauschning The Voice of Destruction (1940)

In mathematics, in science, and in life, we constantly face the delicate, tricky task of separating design from happenstance.

Ivars Peterson The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)

Ethnology or Anthropology, the science of Man, must not shun him in his innermost self, in his instinctive and emotional life.

Bronisław Malinowski Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)

It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country.

Thomas Gordon Hake

Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety.

Chris Mooney Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.

David Berlinski A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

Science and traditional knowledge may ask different questions and speak different languages, but they may converge when both truly listen to the plants.

Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

All nature has intrinsic worth and equality, and whatever science that remains should be nondominating.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke Hitler's Priestess (1998)

The development of any department of science is closely connected with its power of interesting men.

William Trelease

A young man is not an appropriate hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life.

Aristotle

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other.

Noam Chomsky

If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.

Thomas Hardy Two on a Tower (1882)

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