Scientist Quotes - Page 23

• Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Stars, Science, Moon

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• For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Science, Self, Views

  Rudyard Kipling, M.M. Kaye (2002). “Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse”, Kyle Cathie Limited

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• I am a medical scientist, not a practical physician. I think it's very upfront. I am a doctor. I have long experience with heart disease.

  Robert Jarvik

  Heart, Thinking, Doctors

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• My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Mother, Father, Class

  "Mindfulness in the Modern World: An Interview With Jon Kabat-Zinn". Omega Institute Interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 7, 2012.

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• To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Men, Names

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• The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

  Primo Levi

  Country, Believe, Science

  1985 Other People's Trades,'News from the Sky' (translated by Raymond Rosenthal,1989).

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• But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

  Robertson Davies

  Science, Understanding, Dubious

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• The artisan or scientist or the follower of whatever discipline who has the habit of comparing himself not with other followers but with the discipline itself will have a lower opinion of himself, the more excellent he is.

  Giacomo Leopardi

  Discipline, Followers, Opinion

  Giacomo Leopardi (1987). “Leopardi: Poems and Prose”, Praeger Pub Text

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• It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Science, Trying, Roles

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (2013). “Uncommon Sense”, p.82, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Dream, Responsibility, Science

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• A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive"; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture - in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Art, Hero, Men

  "Our Blood". Book by Andrea Dworkin, 1976.

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• The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.

  Ruth Benedict

  Opposites, Humanity, Culture

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.470, Transaction Publishers

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• The Microbe is so very small
  You cannot make him out at all,
  But many sanguine people hope
  To see him through a microscope.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Science, Sanguine, Microbes

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• It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Science, Men, Race

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• I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Age, Doctrine, Fiction

  Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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• The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became real according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: I swallow it, therefore it is.

  Florence King

  Real, Health, Long Ago

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• In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

  Donald Knuth

  Want, Fields, Facts

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• The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

  James Bryant Conant

  Fighting, Science, Prejudice

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• The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Science, Affair

  1906 Collected in The Notebooks of Paul Klee (published 1957).

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• Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

  Edwin Newman

  People, Sides, Social

  Edwin Newman (1974). “Strictly Speaking: Will america be the Death of English?”

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• Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.

  Paul Davies

  Law, Issues, Looks

  "Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. June 25, 2007.

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• Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life - plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.

  Paul Davies

  Origin Of Life, Support, Stories

  "Life, but not as we know it" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2010.

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• The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don't know it have so far been overlooked.

  Paul Davies

  Majority, Example, Facts

  "Life, but not as we know it" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2010.

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• Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

  Paul Davies

  Law, Inquiry, Birth

  "Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. June 25, 2007.

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• When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.

  Paul Davies

  Jobs, Law, Limits

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