Science and Reason

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people on Earth would be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start out again, and civilization would be restored.

The essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms … The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

Every passing hour brings the Solar Systemforty-three thousand miles closer to GlobularCluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.

Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.

Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.

All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.

New philosophy calls all in doubt.

We ought never to allow ourselves to be persuaded of the truth of anything unless on the evidence of our own reason.

I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

[ Of Lucretius :] Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas .

[Science may be divided into either one of] physics and stamp-collecting.

Science, my lad, has been built upon manyerrors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

It is contrary to reason to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

The expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than ‘Struggle for Existence’], and is sometimes equally convenient.

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15–inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.