Science Quotes - Page 269

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

The Sun, the stars and the seasons as they pass, some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear.

Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she hurries back, And will burst through your foolish contempt, triumphant.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.

For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung.

A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.

Liebig was not a teacher in the ordinary sense of the word. Scientifically productive himself in an unusual degree, and rich in chemical ideas, he imparted the latter to his advanced pupils, to be put by them to experimental proof; he thus brought his pupils gradually to think for themselves, besides showing and explaining to them the methods by which chemical problems might be solved experimentally.

The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.

What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, 'Oh, how ugly.' As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.

To most ... of us, Russia was as mysterious and remote as the other side of the moon and not much more productive when it came to really new ideas or inventions. A common joke of the time [mid 1940s] said that the Russians could not surreptitiously introduce nuclear bombs in suitcases into the United States because they had not yet been able to perfect a suitcase.

We seem to be heading for a state of affairs in which the determination of whether or not Doomsday has arrived will be made either by an automatic device ... or by a pre-programmed president who, whether he knows it or not, will be carrying out orders written years before by some operations analyst.

There is no such thing as a good nuclear weapons system. There is no way to achieve, in the sound sense, national security through nuclear weapons.

The research reported on in our book "A=B", has moved a whole active field of mathematics from the province of human thought to the realm of computer-fodder. It is quite exciting to think about what other fields of pure mathematics, hitherto thought to be reserved to human intelligence, might be moved to that realm next. The goal is to put ourselves out of business completely, and the work is well underway.

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

Science is the key which unlocks the storehouses of nature.

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.

Man is still by instinct a predatory animal given to devilish aggression. The discoveries of science have immensely increased productivity of material things. They have increased the standards of living and comfort. They have eliminated infinite drudgery. They have increased leisure. But that gives more time for devilment. The work of science has eliminated much disease and suffering. It has increased the length of life. That, together with increase in productivity, has resulted in vastly increased populations. Also it increased the number of people engaged in devilment.

It is obvious that while science is struggling to bring Heaven to earth some men are using its materials in the construction of Hell.

Professor Brown: 'Since this slide was made,' he opined, 'My students have re-examined the errant points and I am happy to report that all fall close to the [straight] line.' Questioner: 'Professor Brown, I am delighted that the points which fell off the line proved, on reinvestigation, to be in compliance. I wonder, however, if you have had your students reinvestigate all these points that previously fell on the line to find out how many no longer do so?'

O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.

Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence. ... No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself.

The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.

Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.