8,157 Quotes About Science

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

No science is speedily learned by the noblest genius without tuition.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.