Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.

The dedicated physician is constantly striving for a balance between personal, human values, scientific realities and the inevitabilities of God's will.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.

Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?"

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.

Like the furtive collectors of stolen art, cell biologists are forced to be lonely admirers of spectacular architecture, exquisite symmetry, dramas of violence and death, mobility, self-sacrifice and, yes, rococo sex.

Cells let us walk, talk, think, make love and realize the bath water is cold.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

He is so old that his blood type was discontinued.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike-and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.

Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those forces that link us with all those that have being.

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

The scientific community having made a rapid ascent from deep poverty to great affluence, from academe's cloisters to Washington's high councils, still tends to be a bit excitable - not unlike a nouveau riche in a fluctuating market.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

Leave the atom alone.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

I look forward to the day when a mongolian idiot, treated biochemically, becomes a successful geneticist.

Bush reiterated his stand to conservatives opposing his decision on stem cell research. He said today he believes life begins at conception and ends at execution.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

A satellite has no conscience.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Happiness hates the timid! So does science!

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically,' they really mean, 'not really.'

That theory is worthless. It isn't even wrong!

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged is scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.

The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.