Science Apology Quotes

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James

We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls. ~ G.H. Hardy

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. ~ G.H. Hardy

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. ~ Steve Jobs

I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform. ~ Sarah Hall

Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. ~ Feyerabend Paul K.

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds.
Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. ~ Evelyn Underhill

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic. ~ James Buchan

Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it. ~ Henry Jacob Bigelow

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. ~ Vernor Vinge

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless. ~ Bertrand Russell

In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap. ~ Bertrand Russell

The 'destiny that eyes us from the future' makes us neglect our duties to those close to us. Third-Worldism stressed the crimes of colonialism in order to avoid speaking about the crimes of the decolonized; ecologists, wholly absorbed in their science-fiction ethics, care more about our possible misdeeds than about present injustices. ~ Pascal Bruckner

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers. ~ C.S. Lewis

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem. ~ Matt Haig

I try to read everything that's sent me - play scripts, movie scripts - but I've had to make a rule. If the author hasn't grabbed me by Page 25, the piece goes back with a note of apology. ~ Hume Cronyn

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em. ~ Ray Bradbury

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

And we daily in our experiments electrise bodies plus or minus, as we think proper. [These terms we may use till your Philosophers give us better.] To electrise plus or minus, no more needs to be known than this, that the parts of the Tube or Sphere, that are rubb'd, do, in the Instant of Friction, attract the Electrical Fire, and therefore take it from the Thin rubbing; the same parts immediately, as the Friction upon them ceases, are disposed to give the fire they have received, to any Body that has less. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. ~ Herbert Spencer

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops. ~ Rudolf Virchow

Don't just discover . . . Encounter! ~ J.P. Osterman

School taught me how to do language, maths and science; it failed to teach me the very basics of how to keep my home healthy. ~ Steven Magee

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

They didn't understand what they were doing.
I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race. ~ Michael Crichton

You're just jealous because I have conquered world of literature, as well as science. ~ Katie Kennedy

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. ~ Frank Herbert

Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations. ~ George Sarton

Science is moving closer to weaponry, and Art is moving closer to commercialism. And never the twain shall meet. ~ Frank Zappa

He thinks perhaps there's a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases. ~ Blake Crouch

After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Ask very pointed questions. Sharp as sword blades, or laser blasts, if you catch my meaning. ~ Michael Monroe

Science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him. ~ Johannes Kepler

You took it with good grace when you could have sliced him to ribbons with a few words."
"I was tempted," she admitted. "But I couldn't help remembering something Mother once said."
It had been on a long-ago morning in her childhood, when she and Gabriel had still needed books stacked on their chairs whenever they sat at the breakfast table. Their father had been reading a freshly ironed newspaper, while their mother, Evangeline, or Evie, as family and friends called her, fed spoonfuls of sweetened porridge to baby Raphael in his high chair.
After Phoebe had recounted some injustice done to her by a playmate, saying she wouldn't accept the girl's apology, her mother had persuaded her to reconsider for the sake of kindness.
"But she's a bad, selfish girl," Phoebe had said indignantly.
Evie's reply was gentle but matter-of-fact. "Kindness counts the most when it's given to people who don't deserve it."
"Does Gabriel have to be kind to everyone too?" Phoebe had demanded.
"Yes, darling."
"Does Father?"
"No, Redbird," her father had replied, his mouth twitching at the corners. "That's why I married your mother- she's kind enough for two people."
"Mother," Gabriel had asked hopefully, "could you be kind enough for three people?"
At that, their father had taken a sudden intense interest in his newspaper, lifting it in front of his face. A quiet wheeze emerged from behind it.
"I'm afraid not, dear," Evie had said gently, her ~ Lisa Kleypas

Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions. ~ Winston Churchill

SCIENCE is a part of EVERYONE'S everyday life. ~ Bill Nye

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them. ~ Craig Venter

Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate; these waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. ~ Edmund Burke

I treat every student who walks through those doors the same because we are here to teach, if not political science, maybe a little something about critical thinking or even - gasp! - life. If students came to us fully formed and without insecurities, what would be the point? ~ Harlan Coben

I studied science and journalism at the University of Colorado and then got interested in experimental film there and started doing my own films. ~ Eric Darnell

One particular aspect of Siddhartha's revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm's length from multiplicity. ~ Daniel Tammet

Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish this desired end. ~ David O. McKay

There are a lot of reasons people don't talk about climate change. One of them has to do with the language of science, and people feeling not competent about this issue. ~ Margaret D. Klein

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it. ~ Christopher Paolini

Problem Boats
We keep extra boats stuck to these doors for people to use if there's a problem that makes them not want to be in space anymore, but no one will come get them. ~ Randall Munroe

I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium. ~ Peter Greenaway

We need to look at less obvious paths, things like the wind in the jet stream, which is very high up. The material science of what type of kite string you would need to connect up to that. That's still at the basic research level. ~ Bill Gates

It's time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us - and they are out there, too - have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial ~ Whitley Strieber

In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Queers can't destroy science fiction. No one can. No one can destroy the future. But we can, through malice or complacency or inattention, limit the future. ~ Sigrid Ellis

We need justice. We need toleration, honesty and moral courage. These are modern virtues without which we cannot hope to control the forces science has let loose among us. ~ I. A. R. Wylie