Science Fictionce Quotes

Is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality? ~ Blake Crouch

It seems to me that the Swedish Academy of Science may be qualifying for the Nobel Peace Prize. It recognises no nationality; it discourages unworthy national feeling and prejudice. ~ Charles Glover Barkla

Today we have different idols. . . We have trusted in human reason, science, and technology to solve our problems and progress toward a better world and a prosperous life. Yet idolatry brings death. ~ Craig G. Bartholomew

We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. ~ Charles Kettering

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. ~ Hippocrates

A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories. ~ Raymond Cattell

The fire crackled. On Jutaire, without oxygen, the fire is different. Fed by different air. Maybe it wishes it were orange, for it sputters and reaches up to the sky with angry fists of blue and purple. It still doesn't know we can't all get what we want. ~ Hafsah Faizal

The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them. ~ Rudolf Virchow

For such people, the ruling gods are progress, science, and development. They imagine that we know so much more about the world than those people of olden times, because "we" have science. Of course, they themselves do not have science, they have simply heard and believed that scientific knowledge is real knowledge. They know little about the goals and methods of science, and nothing about the Islamic Intellectual tradition. They are blind imitators in intellectual issues, that is, on the level where they should be striving for their own understanding. What is worse, this is a selective imitation, since they only accept the authority of the "scientists" and the "experts", not that of the great Muslim thinkers of the past. If Einstein said it, it must be true, but if Al-Ghazali or Mulla Sadra said it, then it can't be true, because it isn't scientific. ~ William C. Chittick

Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology. ~ Christian De Duve

He who lives for nothing costs the lives of many, but he who lives for something greater than himself preserves those he loves. ~ Christopher Hopper

Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Nothing in science has any value to society if it is not communicated, and scientists are beginning to learn their social obligations. ~ Anne Roe

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know. ~ William James

Next day, after lunch, I went to see "our" doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions. ~ Evan Esar

I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting. ~ Roger Zelazny

To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical. ~ Georges Canguilhem

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. ~ John Ruskin

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any
science may do much more by that than by any direct apologetic work…. We can
make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but
the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they
are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted….
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by
Christians on other subjects - with their Christianity latent. You can see this most
easily if you look at it the other way around. Our faith is not very likely to be
shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book
on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were
Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of
Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic
assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on
Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he
wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the
market was always by a Christian. ~ C.S. Lewis

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

A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology. ~ Paul Davies

If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist. ~ Peter Debye

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Spinsterhood didn't matter much to her; she was already married to science. ~ Lev A.C. Rosen

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

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems. ~ David J. Anderson

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith. ~ George Santayana

None of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture. ~ Richard Dawkins

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can't afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it's all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government's policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology - something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write. ~ Arkady Strugatsky

After you kids came along, your mom, she said something to me I never quite understood. She said, "Now, we're just here to be memories for our kids." I think now I understand what she meant. Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future. ~ Cooper

science is the salvation narrative of modernity. ~ Thomas S. Popkewitz

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics. ~ Jerry Moran

No matter how hard you try, after the Day there will always be a Night ... ~ Luis Marques

The shield went down for such a brief moment that, when it sealed again, the tail of the lasomag charge deflected wildly. Adrenaline fired, he dove for the floor, heart racing, as the flash burst backwards, striking someone in Theta's section. Panic swelled in a shrieking roar, front to back, some scattering, others frozen in place. ~ Marcha A. Fox

The explanation is that their science is only a very attenuated form of our universal ignorance. ~ Gustave Le Bon

Sin's cold, calculating, and dangerous. She scares the shit outta me. I wouldn't want to meet her in a dark alley and that's the truth. Compared to her, you're a damned Sun angel."
"You just don't know her," Cass said in a soft voice, her mouth curving the slightest bit. "She's really very sweet."
"Sure," Nick scoffed. "Sweet as sugar. Let's get back to why you won't let me put my hands on you. ~ Michelle O'Leary

Books are important, and so serious intellectual attention to them is important. While promplty published scholarly articles are also important, the book format remains the only format that allows scholars, in every field and from every prespective, to take the time and space to develop an argument in depth. Books are at the heart of political science. Important books help to create new research agendas. ~ Jeffrey C. Issac Editor-in-Chief Perspectives On Politics 12 2013

An excess of science will leave none of us alive. ~ R.A. Lafferty

She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning. ~ Ray Bradbury

Is the Church inimical to science? Growing up as a Catholic and a scientist - I don't see it. One truth is revealed truth, the other is scientific truth. If you really believe that creation is good, there can be no harm in studying science. The more we learn about creation - the way it emerged - it just adds to the glory of God. Personally, I've never seen a conflict. ~ Joseph Murray

Now and then some one says that the religion of his father and mother is good enough for him, and wonders why anybody should desire a better. Surely we are not bound to follow our parents in religion any more than in politics, science or art. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The science about life is very optimistic. Every second, four people in the world die, and six are born. This is optimistic. ~ Christian Boltanski

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does. ~ Lewis Mumford

With pain in his voice, the camerlengo spoke of his late Pope... the victim of an Illuminati poisoning. And finally, his words almost a whisper, he spoke of a deadly new technology, antimatter, which in less than two hours threatened to destroy all of Vatican City. ~ Dan Brown

The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Similarly, sexual desire is good, so if men rape for sex (rather than to express anger towards women), rape would not be as evil. Rape is evil; therefore the claim that men rape for sex cannot be correct. More generally, what people instinctively like is good, so if people like beauty, beauty would be a sign of worth. Beauty is not a sign of worth, so the claim that people like beauty cannot be correct.

These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good). Feminism would lose nothing by giving them up. ~ Steven Pinker

Science is not about status quo. It's about revolution. ~ Leon M. Lederman