Without ethics, science would be cruelty.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to...

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character....

I’m taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people....

Das ganze Zeitalter betet das Geld, die Ordnung, das Wissen, Rechnen, Messen und Wägen, alles in allem also den Geist des Geldes und seiner Verwandten an und beklagt es zugleich.

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling...

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

…We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith...

Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.

Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define...

Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms...

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

It’s been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental...

The technological man is limited as his tools. The man without technologies is limitless.

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the...

People today have forgotten they’re really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better. Especially scientists. They may be smart,...

And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when its all around you sure enough know it.” (Serena, 65-66)

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur...

If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory...

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

If you can’t illustrate ‘it’, ‘it’ doens’t belong in Physics as a noun! You can’t put an article in front. You can’t put a verb after!

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey’s ideas about anatomical unity.

He(Prophet Muhammad) was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue;...

Everybody is always touting the division between religion and science…. That division is based on a false premise. It simply doesn’t exist. The first sciences developed from a desire to prove the existence of God....

Dermatology … this young daughter of medicine …

…I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described…It’s just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it...

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists...

The world is a spheroid, designed to never end. We can explore it without limits, and we will have not end.

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips…I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given...

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks...

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons...

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to...

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent...

IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that’s one of its functions – so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of “inspiration.” It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge — that is to say,...

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these...

We determined that this is a grave misconduct that damages the foundation of science.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the...

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the...

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25...

The whole point of science is to help people sort out conflicting science, and nowhere is there more conflicting claims than in the area of diet, … It’s important to bring together good scientists. Good...

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.