Science Quotes – Insightful Reflections on Research and Knowledge

"In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth."

Fred Hoyle

"All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control."

Bill Cooper

"Given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite."

Paul Feyerabend

"The sciences of today are business enterprises run on business principles. Research in large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion, and the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is - which means military matters."

Paul Feyerabend

"The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution."

Paul Feyerabend

"There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory."

Robert A. Heinlein

"Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth."

Rupert Sheldrake

"Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system."

Rupert Sheldrake

"A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice."

Karl Popper

"The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game."

Karl Popper

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence."

Nikola Tesla

"The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

Nikola Tesla

"So, we are not living in the age of science, but rather in the darkest religious age of various cults—yes, all of which share a common goal, a common denominator: to enslave people and keep them intellectually stunted.

Yes, that is the brief conclusion from this overview of the various scientific disciplines."

Franz Hörmann

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Richard Charles Lewontin

"I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me."

Steven Spielberg

"Knowledge is found only by those who have questions."

Hans-Georg Gadamer

"Science itself is dead. The university has become a brothel of third-party funding.
I mean that quite seriously — a colleague of mine once said this when her rector at a university in the Ruhr region drove away in a sports car wearing a gold chain.

We each have our little room there, and we make a career if we let ourselves be used by whoever provides the funding.

In other words, the agenda and the criteria for quality are outsourced. The criterion of truth becomes corrupted by the criterion of external funding.

Not everyone who accepts external funding behaves this way, of course. But the metaphor of the brothel was meant to illustrate that love can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought — and that science can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought."

Matthias Burchardt