178 Quotes About Scientists

Look, I don't know what you are, but you're more than a geologist, if you are one at all. I've met lots of geologists on different projects like this, and they're all tiny sunburned men with fetishes for geodes. They wear floppy hats and carry baggies for soil samples around with them. ... And geologists don't make rocks disappear like you did the other night. They keep them and build little shrines to them.

I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

Scientists know it (matter) hardly skin deep, and yet they will dogmatise.

On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.

Things were different in the past. People idolized thinkers, philosophers, artists and scientists. Today the world admires CEOs, businessmen and managers. Basically, the people who are rich and successful in terms of wealth. This is why the world today is messed up.

Science is like a candle, it can light up a room or it can burn down a house - in the hands of the responsible scientist it lights up the world but in the hands of the empty scientist it'll burn the whole world to ashes.

Ten average scientists with a strong sense of humanity can do more good to the world than a hundred brilliant scientists with weak humanity.

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one. Each new idea is dependent upon the ideas of the past. The whole structure of science gradually grows, but only as it is built upon a firm foundation of past research. Each generation of scientists stands upon the shoulders of those who have gone before.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.