Justice, love, truth, peace and harmony, a serene unity with science and the laws of the universe.

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight...

Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them...

Dissection … teaches us that the body of man is made up of certain kinds of material, so differing from each other in optical and other physical characters and so built up together as to...

I remembered the old doctor, – “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied...

The universe seems to be a lot like a car or a computer, in that it’s designed to be user-friendly, which doesn’t necessarily require the user to have a clue what’s going on under the...

One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We...

Necessity is not the mother of invention. Knowledge and experiment are its parents. It sometimes happens that successful search is made for unknown materials to fill well-recognized and predetermined requirements. It more often happens that...

The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other...

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that “acquired characters” or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can...

Common human experience alone is no guarantee with which we can build a science of psychology.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our...

discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a...

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and...

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that...

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard...

…I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It...

As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there’s someone ready to take his place.He chuckled rather heartily at my naiveté....

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

Nature never jests.

Astrology is a cousin of racism.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

The digital age believes in the rational ordering of human beings. We believe that information will eventually solve every conceivable problem.

The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our...

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better...

I don’t know what being god must feel like, but it can’t be much different that being an inventor.There is power in the idea that a certain product never existed before you thought of it,...

Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its...

The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.

One is almost tempted to say… at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which,...

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? […] Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist.

The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish...

I think that the formation of [DNA’s] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

Every medicine is vain.

If you act for self-gain then no good can come of it. If you act selflessly, then you act well for all and you must not be afraid.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because...

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]

The history of man is simply the history of slavery, of injustice and brutality, together with the means by which he has, through the dead and desolate years, slowly and painfully advanced. He has been...

Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher...

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can...

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people...

I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work … all the more willingly because I have for many years been a...