Science Quotes – Insightful Reflections on Research and Knowledge

"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

"The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need."

Daniel Kahneman

"Planning replaces coincidence with error. From error we can learn, from coincidence we cannot."

Prof. Dr. Werner Kirsch

"Doubt is the first step in gaining knowledge; without it, we could not progress. Doubt means we are questioning our beliefs and prepared to learn new things."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"The first way to know something is, of course, through personal experience. You know that your living room is painted green because you’ve been in your living room and saw that it was green. (I won’t worry here about things like how you know you aren’t dreaming or insane or such.) Similarly you know what a bird is, how gravity works (again, in an everyday sense), and how to get to the nearest shopping mall, all by direct experience.
The second way to know things is by authority. That is, you rely on some source of information, believing it to be reliable, when you have no experience of your own. So almost every person who has gone to school believes that the earth goes around the sun, even though very few people would be able to tell you how anybody could even detect that motion. You are relying on authority if, when asked if you know the way to San Jose, you answer yes and pull out a map. You might be able to personally test the map’s reliability by using it to navigate to San Jose, but until you do you are relying on authority. Many people believe democracy is superior to other forms of government even though they haven’t lived under any other type. They rely on the authority of textbooks and politicians, and perhaps on verbal or pictorial descriptions of what it’s like in other societies. Of course other societies do the same, and most of their defenders rely on authority."

Michael J. Behe

"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

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

Christopher Hitchens

"We see entire societies suddenly fixate their thoughts on a single topic and lose their minds; millions of people are simultaneously gripped by a single delusion until their attention is captured by a new absurdity more fascinating than the first."

Charles MacKay

"The first bachelor generation is just climbing the university chairs. People who are perfectly trained in their craft, who have internalized the hegemonic ideology, and who are good advertising media for a system that needs academic confirmation in order to be able to continue to say 'democracy'. This generation already determines what 'good science' is. It fills journals, conference programs, and so eventually textbooks, lectures, and seminars - with topics, perspectives, and terms it has taken from the political agenda and the tenders linked to it, and which it doesn't question because it couldn't learn that anywhere."

Michael Meyen

"Children are taught in their geography books, when too young to apprehend aright the meaning of such things, that the world is a great globe revolving around the Sun, and the story is repeated continuously, year by year, till they reach maturity, at which time they generally become so absorbed in other matters as to be indifferent as to whether the teaching be true or not, and, as they hear of nobody contradicting it, they presume that it must be the correct thing, if not to believe at least to receive it as a fact. They thus tacitly give their assent to a theory which, if it had first been presented to them at what are called ‘years of discretion,’ they would at once have rejected. The consequences of evil-teaching, whether in religion or in science, are far more disastrous than is generally supposed, especially in a luxurious laisser faire age like our own. The intellect becomes weakened and the conscience seared."

David Wardlaw Scott

"As an engineer of many years standing, I saw that this absurd allowance is only permitted in school books. No engineer would dream of allowing anything of the kind. I have projected many miles of railways and many more of canals and the allowance has not even been thought of, much less allowed for. This allowance for curvature means this - that it is 8” for the first mile of a canal, and increasing at the ratio by the square of the distance in miles; thus a small navigable canal for boats, say 30 miles long, will have, by the above rule an allowance for curvature of 600 feet. Think of that and then please credit engineers as not being quite such fools. Nothing of the sort is allowed. We no more think of allowing 600 feet for a line of 30 miles of railway or canal, than of wasting our time trying to square the circle"

W. Winckler

"Now, my predecessor loved precision. His matrix consisted only of pedantic facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to understand that you don’t give a damn about facts. It’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one inside here. And you people believe the craziest shit. And why? What confirms your fictions and makes them real? Feelings."

Neil Patrick Harris

"Modern Astrophysics, Quantum Physics, and Astronomy are, in fact, simply repackaged occultism, and they have been passed off as modern science for many decades. This is known as Scientism. The entire Big Bang Myth is simply a Satanic lie which was necessaty in order to transmit other occult lies, such as The Myth of Gravity, Evolution, Heliocentrism, and eventually, give credence and traction to the idea of alien life. The primary occult ideology at the basis of all this is the idea of Cosmic Pantheism. The Big Bang Myth reinforces the idea that The Cosmos evolved from a pin prick of substance, and expanded out for billions of years, which is identical to the Kabbalistic occult teachings at the core of Pantheism."

Gregory Lessing Garrett

"Mathematics is the perfect way to fool oneself."

Albert Einstein

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."

Werner Heisenberg

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Isaac Asimov

"For what I want to say here, knowledge of the book's content is not necessarily required, because it concerns easily understandable facts about the cause and nature of gravitation—the force that presses everything to the ground and is not easily harnessed permanently for propulsion purposes, the force that keeps all celestial bodies in their orbits and holds our entire universe together. How gravitation achieves the feat of creating the conditions for our earthly life remains unexplained by science to this day. Science only offers a series of competing model concepts here. Even the nature of gravitation is largely unknown to it. As Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) said at the time: "I have explained the celestial phenomena and the tides based on gravity, but I have not been able to derive the cause of the properties of gravity from the phenomena so far." Nothing has changed since then. One who must know because he struggled daily with the problem of overcoming it, the former deputy chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce aircraft engine works, A. V. Cleaver, summed it up as follows, I quote literally: "Gravity is truly a highly mysterious and elusive phenomenon. It seems questionable whether many people, even technically trained ones, realize how justified this claim is or whether they notice the conspiracy of silence with which gravity is treated in most physics textbooks. It is almost reminiscent of a Polynesian taboo or the Victorian attitude towards certain topics such as sex or particular organs and functions, which were deemed somewhat improper. The student learns that all bodies attract each other, that the stability of the universe is determined thereby, and the equations of Newton's laws describe their effects. Yet—unless he is a specialized graduate student of pure physics—he is still expected to accept the old idea of “action at a distance,” and it is quite unlikely that any of his teachers will draw his attention to our complete ignorance of the physical relationships between gravity and other phenomena, simply because we know nothing about it and because the academic world apparently prefers not to broadcast this fact!""

Otto Jung

"Many tired old lies are being fed to secondary and college students through their textbooks and their brainwashed teachers, and to the general public through television receivers and daily newspapers. Despite the well-entrenched position of the pseudoscientists and their powerful allies in politics and the communications media, encouraging progress is being made by some scientists. Bit by bit the truth is emerging and the forces of censorship, moral intimidation and liberal bigotry are losing ground."

MOYO-Film