Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Like the furtive collectors of stolen art, we are forced to be lonely admirers of spectacular architecture, exquisite symmetry, dramas of violence and death, mobility, self-sacrifice and, yes, rococo sex.

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.