All Quotes By Tag: Science

“It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.”

“I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers”

“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?…Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.”

“If you can’t illustrate ‘it’, ‘it’ doens’t belong in Physics as a noun! You can’t put an article in front. You can’t put a verb after!”

“The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore science is one form of electromagnetism that spends it time studying another form…science is god explaining god through a human nervous system…isn’t spirituality the same thing?”

“I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.”

“Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.”This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case “I do not want to deceive myself” is subsumed under the generalization “I do not want to deceive.” But why not deceive?But why not allow oneself to be deceived?Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting?”

“Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113”

“We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.”

“All things remarkable are surprisingly simple; albeit difficult to find.”

“I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that’s the truth, ain’t it?”

“Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.”

“One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.”

“The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.”