Henry David Thoreau Quotes

So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.

Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.

Science is the one human activity that is totally progressive.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.

So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn’t have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

The first issue that compelled me was a very strange split between India being highly development scientifically (we were the third biggest scientific manpower in the world then) and yet at the same time struggling with amazing poverty. The linear equation that says that modern science equals progress and the reduction of poverty did not apply to India. It wasn't working.

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Science is the future of mankind.

Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter?

I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before science came.

most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.