#science

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

"The four stages of acceptance:1. This is worthless nonsense.2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.3. This is true, but quite unimportant.4. I always said so."(Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464)"

"In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed."

"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible."

"William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."

"Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved."

"The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them"

"Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora."

"What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability."

"There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain."

"Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it."

"The human spirit must prevail over technology."

"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion."

"... respecto al origen del mundo, si es que lo tuvo, no nos queda más remedio que aceptar que nunca sabremos cómo ocurrió y que Dios es una explicación necia que no explica nada pues es tan difícil imaginar la eternidad suya como la de la materia. Dios es la vuelta del bobo: lo postulamos para entender cuanto no entendemos, pero sin entenderlo a Él."

"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?"

"It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths."

"The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)"

"To be able to see into a friends' dream is a dream in itself.-Doctor Kōsaku Tokita (Paprika)"

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."

"Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned."