To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

- Stephen Hawking

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

- Carl Sagan

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito. [Spirituality for the Skeptic]

- Robert C. Solomon

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

- Madame de Stael

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

- Emerson M. Pugh

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

- Albert Einstein

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

- Linus Pauling

Science is the search for truth -- it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find t he right solution, the just solution of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible.

- Linus Pauling

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe -- the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

- Immanuel Kant

Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.

- Parker J. Palmer

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

- Linus Pauling

I seem to have been like a child playing on the seashore, finding new and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

- Isaac Newton

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

- Henri-Frederic Amiel

Science cannot be stopped. Man will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences - and we cannot predict what they will be. Science will go on -- whether we are pessimistic, or are optimistic, as I am. I know that great, interesting, and valuable discoveries can be made and will be made... But I know also that still more interesting discoveries will be made that I have not the imagination to describe -- and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

- LInus Pauling

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

- Louis D. Brandeis

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings.

- Richard Dawkins



I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

- Albert Einstein



Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

- Isaac Asimov



A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

- Isaac Asimov



Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

- Henri Poincare



The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



It is at once evident that a religion which is able to make vital connection with a world-view based on the principles inherent in evolution, democracy, and science will be a new thing under the sun.

- A. Eustace Haydon



Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgements remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.

- Albert Einstein



Knowledge has three degrees -- opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

- Plotinus



It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

- Jules H. Poincare



Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

- Jonas Salk



When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

- Jean Rostand



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



The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

- Stephen Jay Gould



We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.

- Margaret J. Wheatley



I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

- Galileo Galilei



There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

- Marie Curie



Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

- Arthur Eddington



One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

- Carl Sagan



The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

- Galileo Galilei



Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

- Thomas Jefferson



The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

- H. L. Mencken



In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!

- Homer Simpson



The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...."

- Isaac Asimov



Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

- Howard Nemerov



It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

- Henrik Ibsen



Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

- Albert Einstein



Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

- Albert Einstein