Inspirational Science Quotes

The ethos of Science:

• Honesty
• Creativity
• Full Disclosure
• Anti-Athoritarianism

In a 2001 NSF Survey on Science Literacy (figure 7-6):

• 53% of American adults were unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose.
• 50% of adults knew that the earth orbits the sun, and takes a year to do it.
• 53% of adults knew that "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."

 In April 2007:

•  60% of US adults stated their belief that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago!

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf/c07.pdf

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/c7/c7s2.htm




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"Science does not know its debt to imagination. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson


"You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode.So forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today." - Lawrence M. Krauss


"The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it" - Lawrence M. Krauss


"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, The Nature of Natural History (1950)


“Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.” - George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 345.


"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science." - Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954


"I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe." - Ken Jenkins


"No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer." - Thomas Browne


"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate." - Henry J. Tillman


"Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope." - Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends, 1972


"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883


"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776


"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." - Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy


"My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity." - Bertrand Russell, "Is There a God?" commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine (1952: repr. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, ed. John G Slater and Peter Köllner (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543-48, quoted from S T Joshi, Atheism: A Reader


"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." - Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1950), p. 149, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief


"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell, "Christian Ethics" from Marriage and Morals (1950), quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief


"Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred." - Bertrand Russell, thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"


"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." - Bertrand Russell (attributed: source unknown)


"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic." - Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1950), quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief


"Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked." - Bertrand Russell, "The Value Of Free Thought," thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"


"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived." - Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1891)


"The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty." - Richard P Feynman


"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consiousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time - life and death - stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out." - Richard P Feynman (attributed: source unknown)


"I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." - Richard P Feynman, "Genius, the Life and Science," quoted from "An Analysis of the Wisdom of Richard Feyman For the Edification and Entertainment of Philip Adams" a letter from David Quinn to Phillip Adams (September 5,1993)


"Whatever one's religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts -- including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state." - John F Kennedy, Interview, Look, March 3, 1959, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom


"We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation." - John F Kennedy, Interview, CBS-TV, "Face the Nation," October 30, 1960, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom


"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated as equals - where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice - where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind - and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood." - John F Kennedy, address to the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston, September 12, 1960, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom


"It's a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science - that it has made it possible for people not to be religious." - Steven Weinberg, quoted in Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001


"Science does not make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible NOT to believe in God." - Steven Weinberg, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics


"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999


"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000


"I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make." - Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000


"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." - George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, Preface (1916)


"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the extended of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence - and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl - once in a million years - casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God." - Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp 51-2


“To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reliving of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment." - Isaac Asimov, 1981


"Evolution is a fact amply demonstrated by the fossil record and by contemporary molecular biology.  Natural selection is a successful theory devised to explain the fact of evolution." - Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, p.6


“The first point to make about Darwin’s theory is that it is no longer a theory, but a fact . . . Darwinianism has come of age so to speak. We do no longer have to bother about establishing the fact of evolution.” - Julian Huxley, “At Random,” a television preview on Nov. 21, 1959. Also, Sol Tax, Evolution of Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 1


“It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form.” - Julian Huxley, “At Random,” a television preview on Nov. 21, 1959




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Quotes & Quotations Sources:


Positive Atheism Quotes

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/