Citizen Science Quotes

I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don't have to work so hard. I have thought nature indifferent to humans, to one more human, but maybe the reverse is true. Maybe the world is already in love, giving us these gifts all the time - the glimpse of a fox, tracks in the sand, a breeze, a flower
calling out all the time: take this. And this. And this. Don't turn away. ~ Sharman Apt Russell

Science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed citizen of society. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The passion for finding the system in experience, replacing surprise with order, is a persistent part of human nature ... Science came to mean the elimination of surprise. It outlawed miracles, because miracles are above all unexpected. ~ George Gilder

The shape I'm in, I could donate my body to science fiction. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

Sonya, as a scientist, it's never just about the logistics of life. One must always be optimistic, or else you'll never discover or learn anything new. Though of course, you might also find that such a mentality should never be restricted to such an occupation as mine. ~ Lauren Lola

The rest of the planets have their dress and furniture, nay and their inhabitants too, as well as this Earth of ours. ~ Christiaan Huygens

The Assassin the midst the deadly druid
Fury the shattering ~ Thomas E. Sniegoski

The industry had realized you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions ~ Naomi Oreskes

Believing that war is contrary to the will of God and to common sense, and feeling that the way of peace is the way of love, I shall work for peace by using the way of love myself, by helping any group I am part of to use it, by helping the nation of which I am a citizen to use it, by helping the United Nations to use it, and by praying that the way of love be used all over the world. ~ Peace Pilgrim

And men of science,' cries dixon, 'may be but the simple tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a hammer knows of a house. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy. ~ Roger Bacon

With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else's company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment. ~ Jaron Lanier

Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man. His case is used over and over again because critics can't think of any other scientists who were mistreated by the Church. And in this instance they're right. There may have been some people in the scientific world who did not enjoy Church support and were even challenged by Catholicism but, sorry to disappoint, there weren't very many of them. The Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery, and those who refer to Galileo tend to forget that Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, was a devout Catholic, as was Alexander Fleming, who gave us penicillin. Or Father Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the theory of the earth revolving around the sun - this was precisely what Galileo stated, but Copernicus taught it as theory and not fact. Or Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, who proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In the field of acceleration, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli changed the way we understand that particular science; the father of modern Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher, and the Yugoslavian Fr. Roger Boscovich was the founder of modern atomic theory. ~ Michael Coren

We got places to go, people to meet, and things to blow up!
That needs to be cross-stiched on a pillow ~ Ezekiel Carsella

Spring is the season of crying and seeing nothing. Of choking up on someone else's trash. ~ Franny Choi

God resides most strongly and evidently where science has not yet progressed to go ... And if this is true then it follows that God resides everywhere and in everything. ~ Terryl L. Givens

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper. ~ George Polya

In order to thrive in the 21st century, you have to be a savvy citizen of the digital economy or risk being left behind. ~ Leila Janah

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth - and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth - and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere. ~ Boris Johnson

All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to foster the development of the child into the scientist. I don't advocate turning all children into professional scientists, although I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma, of whatever variety. ~ Marston Bates

I also like to look at the dynamic that takes place between religion and science because, in a way, both are asking the same questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The methodologies are diametrically opposed, but their motivation is the same; the wellspring is the same in both cases. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

The Seductive Lure of Socialism Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Is it hot in here? I'm sweating like a Christian in science class. ~ Aaron B. Powell

Significance unfortunately is a useful means toward a personal ends in the advance of science - status and widely distributed publications, a big laboratory, a staff of research assistants, a reduction in teaching load, a better salary, the finer wines of Bordeaux. Precision, knowledge, and control. In a narrow and cynical sense statistical significance is the way to achieve these. Design experiment. Then calculate statistical significance. Publish articles showing "significant" results. Enjoy promotion.

But it is not science, and it will not last. ~ Stephen Thomas Ziliak

We have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science. ~ Jamie Hyneman

It is my belief that no matter how advanced man may become in science, technology, systems, and knowledge, he can never improve on the foundational precepts of marriage as the bedrock of social development. ~ Myles Munroe

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature. ~ Albert Einstein

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts. ~ Mike Tyson

Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books. ~ Eike Batista

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. ~ H.L. Mencken

The test of science is not whether you are reasonable - there would not be much of physics if that was the case - the test is whether it works. And the great point about Newton's theory of gravitation was that it worked, that you could actually say something about the motion of the moon without knowing very much about the constitution of the Earth. ~ Hermann Bondi

Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly denied to individuals ~ Richard Dawkins

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness. ~ Tom DeLonge

I woke up to the world of science when my high school chemistry teacher introduced me to the elegantly ordered periodic table. ~ Isadore Singer

Authority. The antithesis of science. ~ Stephen Baxter

Well, I guess [2001: A Space Odyssey] legitimized [science fiction], particularly for people who looked down on science fiction; you know, the intelligentsia. My definition of the intelligentsia: someone who's educated beyond their intelligence. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

On the one hand, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment (that's a metaphor, by the way) correctly "enlightened" us on the necessity of observation and experimentation in the physical sciences and the value of reason and debate, proof and repetition in science and technology. In that process, the dead hand of inquisitional power and the cold gaze of ecclesiastical control were removed from spheres about which they knew too little and claimed too much. That was a magnificent achievement and must always be appreciated as such.

On the other hand, the Enlightenment also dramatically "endarkened" us on metaphor and symbol, myth and parable, especially in religion and theology. We judge, for example, that the ancients took their religious stories literally, but that we are now sophisticated enough to recognize their delusions. What, however, if those ancients intended and accepted their stories as metaphors or parables, and we are the mistaken ones? What if those pre-Enlightenment minds were quite capable of hearing a metaphor, grasping its meaning immediately and its content correctly, and never worrying about the question: Is this literal or metaphorical? Or, better, what if they knew how to take their foundational metaphors and stories programmatically, functionally, and seriously without asking too closely about literal and metaphorical distinctions?

We have, in other words, great post-Enlightenment gain, but also great post-Enlighte ~ John Dominic Crossan