A genius is a man who has two great ideas.
A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
Certainty ends inquiry.
Dissent is the mark of freedom.
Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.
Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts.
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature- or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
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