James Bryant Conant Quotes

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.

Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc hypothesis [invented for a purpose] on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.

There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.

A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.

Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.

Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free
society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.

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.