This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived." -
"The brain constantly searches for meaning, for connections between objects and qualities that cross-cut the senses and provide information about external existence… In order to grasp the human condition, both the genes and culture must be understood, not separately in the traditional manner of science and the humanities, but together, in recognition of the realities of human evolution." -
"Historically, we have assumed that it would only be a matter of time before everything would somehow be predicted by science." - Stephen Wolfram
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." - William Wordsworth
"Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science." - Philip Hauge Abelson
"Art is meant to upset people, science reassures them." - Georges Braque
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." - Chapman Cohen
"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." - Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
"I remember that one time Carl [Sagan] was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, "Do something meaningful."" -
"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is good as dead." - Albert Einstein
"There is no such thing as ethical truth. However, those committed to humane-egalitarian ideals can make a truth-claim rare and precious: they can look reality and the truths of science in the face and find nothing that makes them flinch." - James R. Flynn, aka Jim Flynn
"Many of our culture's most important achievements in the arts, science, and technology were made by people who had breakthrough insights in dreams, visions, intuitive flashbacks, and altered states of consciousness. And yet our society generally discounts such experiences, sometimes even treating them as grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness." - Richard Heinberg
"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated." - Howard Nemerov
"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, science is by nature a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology. This must be so given the self-correcting mechanisms that are incorporated into the scientific process, regardless of the occasional failures of individual scientists." - Massimo Pigliucci
"The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." - Alan Turing, fully Alan Mathison Turing
"In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation." - Alexis Carrel
"Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity of wandering." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development." - Alfred North Whitehead
"When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Religion will not gain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science." - Alfred North Whitehead
"For the Founders, minorities are in general bad things, mostly identical to factions, selfish groups which have no concern as such for the common good... The Founders wished to achieve a national majority concerning the fundamental rights and then prevent that majority from using that power to over turn those fundamental rights. In 20th Century social science, however, the common good disappeared and along with it the negative view of minorities. The very idea of majority... is done away with in order to protect the minorities" - Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
"Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit." - Aristotle NULL
"Philosophy is the science which considers truth." - Aristotle NULL
"Science’s horizon is limited by the bounds of Nature, the ideologies by the bounds of social life, but the human soul’s range cannot be confined within either of these limits." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Beyond the nature taught by science is the spirit that gives meaning to life." - Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton
"Science cannot supply a definite answer to this question. Immortality relates to an aspect of life which is not physical, that is which cannot be detected and measured by any instrument, and to which the application of the laws of science can at best be only a well-considered guess." - Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton
"The pursuit of science in itself is never materialistic. It is a search for the principles of law and order in the universe, and as such an essentially religious endeavor." - Arthur Koestler
"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives." - Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
"To the man who studies to gain a thorough insight into science, books and study are merely the steps of the ladder by which he climbs to the summit; as soon as a step has been advanced he leaves it behind. The majority of mankind, however, who study to fill their memory with facts do not use the steps of the ladder to mount upward, but take them off and lay them on their shoulders in order that they may take them along, delighting in the weight of the burden they are carrying. They ever remain below because they carry what should carry them." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science... But the greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and mysticism: the attempt to harmonize the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Science is what you know; philosophy is what you don't know." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"There is a constant relation between the state of the universe at any instant and the rate of change in the rate at which any part of the universe is changing at that instant, and this relation is man-one, i.e., such that the rate of change in the rate of change is determinate when the state of the universe I given. If the ‘law of causality’ is to be something actually discoverable in the practice of science, the above proposition has a better right to the name than any ‘law of causality’ to be found in the books of philosophers." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science." - Carl Sagan
"Art is I; Science is We." - Claude Bernard
"What the world, which truly knows nothing, calls “mysticism” is the science of ultimates… the science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be “reasoned about,” because it is the object of pure reason or perception." - Coventry Patmore, fully Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
"The thesis that there is an inherent conflict between science and our immortal souls is simply untrue." - David Sarnoff
"The final test of science is not whether it adds to our comfort, knowledge and power, but whether it adds to our dignity as men, our sense of truth." - David Sarnoff
"Modern man worships at the temple of science, yet science tells him only what is possible, not what is right." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"Society is indeed a contract... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born." - Edmund Burke
"Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate; these waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues." - Edmund Burke