Quotes about Science

Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we've been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes.

His argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.

We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology.

Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together

Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together.

Abandoning science is the road back into poverty and backwardness.

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality—where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But this isn't enough to explain its popularity.

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.

The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community—as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.