Forbidden Science Quotes

The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates man - man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored. God's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God's first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining - he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself. - So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end - and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God. - "Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva" - every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world" - every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge. - What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike - it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific! - Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality. - "Thou shall not know": - the rest follows from that. - God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's self a ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses? ~ James Morcan

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?' ~ Erwin Chargaff

Science is an inherent contradiction - systematic wonder - applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming's eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it - a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria - and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory? ~ Thomas Lewis

Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I'll teach you not to look at me like that," Charles snarled through his hair before pushing it off his face. "Do you think I didn't notice? The way you look at me when you think I'm not watching?"
Oh, God!
He had to get out of there. Slip out of his grip as soon as possible, before he lost control of his body. He was already feeling it in his groin - the fire Rochester had lit was already making his balls throb.
His reply was desperate, a whisper, a tiny, brazen lie: "You're mistaken."
"Oh, that's how it is, then? You have the nerve to tell me it's not true?" The next moment he felt something firm pressing against his buttocks. Something hot and shameless. Charles's rock-hard erection.
Dorian's lips parted in a surprised moan. The air escaped his lungs and treacherous arousal rose all the way to his throat, breaking his voice and his willpower.
"No…" I don't know. "I didn't mean to. I wasn't spying on you on purpose."
"But you did. You always do. ~ Valentina C. Brin

'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize. ~ Richard Preston

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance. ~ Albert Einstein

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people. ~ Stephen Hawking

Hamlet misspoke, Strawl decided. It is consciousness that makes cowards of us all, not conscience. Right and wrong are venomless when compared to the simple awareness of being alive. The knowledge that existence can equal something past the sum of our circulation and digestion, that those corporeal purposes serve a galaxy of space between a man's ears, whose suns and planets obey his own peculiar science, but one in which he alone recognizes the order, and only in glimpses, epiphanies that melt before he can speak or even think them--and the knowledge even this distant self is not his possession but belongs to others weighing and judging the dim and distant light he emits. ~ Bruce Holbert

Neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science. ~ Francis Bacon

The Qur'an has not merely been revealed in Arabic: it has been revealed in eloquent Arabic. The language is clear and cogent, and there is no vagueness in it; every word is unambiguous and every style adopted is well known to its addressees. The Qur'an says:

The faithful Spirit has brought it down into your heart [O Prophet] that you may become a warner [for people] in eloquent Arabic. (26:193-195)

In the form of an Arabic Qur'an, free from any ambiguity that they may save themselves [from punishment]. (39:28)


This is an obvious reality about the Qur'an. If this premise is accepted, then it must be conceded that no word used or style adopted by the Qur'an is rare or unknown (shadh). Its words and styles are well known and conventionally understood by its addressees. No aspect of the language has any peculiarity or rarity in it. Consequently, while interpreting the Qur'an, the conventionally understood and known meanings of the words should be taken into consideration. Apart from them, no interpretation is acceptable. Thus in the verses: وَالنَّجْمُ وَالشَّجَرُ يَسْجُدَانِ (6:55), the meaning of the word اَلنَّجْمُ can only be "stars". In وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن قَبْلِكَ مِن رَّسُولٍ وَلَا نَبِيٍّ إِلَّا إِذَا تَمَنَّى أَلْقَى الشَّيْطَانُ فِي أُمْنِيَّتِهِ (52:22), the word تَمَنَّى can only mean "desire". In أَفَلَا يَنظُرُونَ إِلَى الْإِبِلِ كَيْفَ خُلِقَتْ (17:88), the word الْإِبِلِ has only been used for "camel". The only meaning of t ~ Javed Ahmad Ghamidi

Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in. ~ Marie Brennan

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions. ~ Terry Pratchett

Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain. ~ Julian May

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering - quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. ~ Freeman A. Hrabowski III

No research will answer all queries that the future may raise. It is wiser to praise the work for what it has accomplished and then to formulate the problems still to be solved. ~ Theobald Smith

So why is it helpful to explore this story, this 'experience' from the point of view of science? Why not just rely on personal experience? Exploring complexity theory allows a direct challenge to the implicit assumptions many people hold that science implies the world is 'mechanical', that it is indeed predictable and controllable. The fact that complexity is a 'new science' has power. Indeed, it reframes science and emphasizes that the only reliable way to investigate the way things are, and certainly the way things change, is through paying attention to the local detail - to the 'minutely organized particulars', as William Blake (1908) called them. ~ Jean G. Boulton

There were many legends about these rocks and behind every legend a story of forbidden love. ~ Elif Shafak

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy. ~ Margaret Mead

Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward. ~ Isaac Newton

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning. ~ Robert Boyle

The confusion between these two diverse human activities - inventing stories and following traces in order to find something - is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night's storytelling. The ~ Carlo Rovelli

Dear Neil Armstrong,

I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon dust to the one you loved could only be wrapped in your imagination.. Before the world knew your name; before it was a destination in the sky.. What was the moon like from your back yard?

Your arm, strong warm and wrapped under her hair both of you gazing up from your back porch summers before your distant journey. But upon landing on the moon, as the earth rose over the sea of tranquility, did you look for her? What was it like to see our planet, and know that everything, all you could be, all you could ever love and long for.. was just floating before you. Did you write her name in the dirt when the cameras weren't looking? Surrounding both your initials with a heart for alien life to study millions of years from now? What was it like to love something so distant? What words did you use to bring the moon back to her? And what did you promise in the moons ear, about that girl back home? Can you, teach me, how to fall from the sky?

I ask you this, not because I doubt your feat, I just want to know what it's like to go somewhere no man had ever been, just to find that she wasn't there. To realize your moon walk could never compare to the steps that led to her. I now know that the fli ~ Mike McGee

The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity. ~ J.I. Packer

I always treated the science thing and the art thing as quite similar thematically. ~ Tim Burton

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. ~ Herbert Wilf

We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. ~ Vaclav Havel

As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. ~ Hermann Hesse

If he'd been any other boy, and this was any other world, I would have kissed him. Nothing could have stopped me. ~ Sarah Dessen

The effort to improve the conditions of man, however, is not a task for the few. It is the task of all nations-acting alone, acting in groups, acting in the United Nations, for plague and pestilence, plunder and pollution, the hazards of nature and the hunger of children are the foes of every nation. The earth, the sea and the air are the concern of every nation. And science, technology and education can be the ally of every nation. ~ John F. Kennedy

The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.) ~ Mary Roach

I fought for seven years to have creche facilities at the Okinawa Institute of Science of Technology - and was ultimately successful. Less successful have been efforts to get a creche at the new Crick Institute in London, but this is something I will continue to push for. ~ Tim Hunt

If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Newton advanced, with one gigantic stride, from the regions of twilight into the noon day of science. A Boyle and a Hooke, who would otherwise have been deservedly the boast of their century, served but as obscure forerunners of Newton's glories. ~ Thomas Young

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms. ~ Carl Benjamin Boyer

Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don't like Tom Purdom, you don't like science fiction. Period. ~ Michael Swanwick

The science of war leads one to dictatorship, pure and simple. The science of non-violence alone can lead one to pure democracy. Power based on love is thousand times more effective and permanent than power derived from fear of punishment. It is a blasphemy to say non-violence can be practiced only by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals. The nearest approach to purest anarchy would be a democracy based on non-violence. A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy. ~ Mahatma Gandhi