Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.

Professor [John] Tyndall once said the finest inspiration he ever received was from an old man who could scarcely read. This man acted as his servant. Each morning the old man would knock on the...

All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the...

It’s peculiar to me,’ she said, ‘that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant...

There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn’t seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as “junk DNA,” though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone...

There are few ways in which good people do more harm to those who take them seriously than to defend the gospel with arguments that won’t hold water. Many of the difficulties encountered by young...

Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better.

Hypotheses like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take...

Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn...

İdeoloji, doğası gereği etkin düşünceye de, etkin duyguya da çekici gelmez. İnsanı ya heyecanlandıran ya da uyutan hap gibidir. Hitler, Mein Kampfda (Kavgam’da) halkı toplayıp galeyana getirmek için en elverişli zamanın, insanların yorgun ve etkilenmeye...

The quest for human knowledge is quintessential element of being human, it’s a part of our nature. We are all scientists and it’s up to each and everyone of us to embark on our own...

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from...

Teaching the layperson (divulgare) is not distorting (tergiversare) the subject, but educating the public; and it is our duty as scientists to educate without distorting the essence of the scientific knowledge attained by humanity. The...

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.

Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by...

A ști anumite lucruri pe de rost îți conferă capacitatea unei înțelegeri superioare.

Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us...

If I have put the case of science at all correctly, the reader will have recognised that modern science does much more than demand that it shall be left in undisturbed possession of what the...

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80’s. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch’s postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. …...

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it has been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it.

I consoled myself with Granddaddy’s words on the fossil record and the Book of Genesis: It was more important to understand something than to like it. Liking wasn’t necessary for understanding. Liking didn’t enter into...

If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would...

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved,...

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking...

In science common sense is nonsense and nonsense is sense.

Not that there’s anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it’s way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It’s just that there are other ways to spend your time as...

lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the...

Using the scientific knowledge that we currently possess, we can take simple logical steps, backed by the strongest evidence that we have, to come to the best and most reasonable conclusion that God is the...

Humans spend more time finding ways to fight and criticize who they consider a threat than actually learning how to overcome that threat.

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus...

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem...

Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, and by accepting–and embracing–the theory of evolution, Christians and conservatives strengthen their religion, their politics, and science itself. The conflict...

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.

Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the...

I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]

we all have dream cars,dream houses and jobs but as soon as we stop dreaming we wake up go take a pee. the world is waiting out here don’t just dream,make it a dream.

Upon the whole, Chymistry is as yet but an opening science, closely connected with the useful and ornamental arts, and worthy the attention of the liberal mind. And it must always become more and more...

This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.{Referring to James Clerk Maxwell’s contributions to physics}

We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.

The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

Beliefs are not some special category of idea sitting at a higher station of truth than our ordinary, everyday mortal thoughts. Beliefs are not neccesarily “the truth” at all. (Remember, there was a time everyone...

While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature.

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.