29 Quotes by James Bryant Conant

It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.

Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.

Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc hypothesis [invented for a purpose] on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science.