Goddard was not personally religious; his most immediate and consistent motivation was a desire for recognition as the founding genius of rocket science.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something...

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck...

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers. Further, it is truly international in scope. Any particular advance has been preceded by the contributions of those from many lands who have set...

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

Call it “a wonder” or “a mystery” and you have an excuse to never try understanding it – an excuse to not take responsibility for it. People knew about love no more than they knew...

Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don’t have much to do with evolution – they’re observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development,...

The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification—judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind—essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific...

The Theist tells us that the truth is god exists,the Atheist tells us that the truth is there is no god,while the truth tells us we don’t know.

For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned, Orders, by the degrees of complication of...

Science is a satisfactory curiosity.

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up...

EVERY WOMAN THAT QUOTES ME IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.

The popular conception of any philosophical doctrine is necessarily imperfect, and very generally unjust. Lucretius is often alluded to as an atheistical writer, who held the silly opinion that the universe was the result of...

As was the case for Nobel’s own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility.

The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: ‘I better get...

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on ‘The Survival of the Fittest.’ These are illustrious names, this...

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn’t have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn’t exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly...

In darkness lies a mystery that has the power to shine brighter than true light. ☥

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself....

Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say...

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check–agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental...

All of science is largely formalized common sense.

More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.

cultures of honor”.

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa’s paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to...

a room without boooks like a body without soul

It’s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how...

Kepler’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler—such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal—were abandoning the study of geometry … because they said it was so UTTERLY...

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use...

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation...

He who replies to words of doubtdoth put the light of knowledge out.

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth...

They intend to make people’s very appetites the next weapon of uncountable destruction. They intend that your people will lust themselves into oblivion in front of little boxes of changing light. Addictive light. A light...

It is this mythical, or rather symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects...

If you’ve got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn’t prove it.

Art can contradict Science.

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

There are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration.

Perhaps it’s the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle’s burrow? Does...

It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented...

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see...