Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Quotes

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

We need to be pro-science; we have to go back to science.

Science has become something that everybody knows he has to pay attention to, but not everybody is a believer. So I don't think we should equate science with religion. But, that science is progressively playing a more and more important part in the life of every individual is obvious.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

In a democratic society, we politicians have to accept criticism, especially when it is founded.

Healthy debate has been replaced by automatic sensors that eliminate the need for actual talking during a filibuster - a la 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' Robust debate is necessary in a democratic society. Instead, our discourse has been relegated to media spin by expert entertainers.

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

It is my idea that the public needs to be better educated about the nature of scientific inquiry and how the scientific process works. I firmly believe that this is the only effective way forward to combat the widespread distrust in facts and science.

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

Some things tend not to work so well for science - things that rely on substantial written contributions by key experts are a case in point - but even there I tend to keep an open mind, because it may just be a case of finding the right formula.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Unfortunately, science cannot be reduced to short, catchy phrases. And if this is all that the general public can comprehend, it's no wonder that we spend so much of our time in the interminable debate about belief in God, or lack thereof.

When people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing.

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?

Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate. Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it's not simply, 'Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is?' That's an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information that's presented in front of you.

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

We are in a democratic society. It's our job to question.

Science rules!

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.