Seth Shostak Quotes

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

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

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

Science is the key to our future, and if you don't believe in science, then you're holding everybody back.

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.

My fear is that in general terms the evolution of the political process proceeds at the same pace as the evolution of the species and I do not myself believe that that is quite fast enough

The emergence of modern science as a major new frontier of advancement that would lead, on one hand, to the discovery of new secrets of the universe, the invention of means to harness those secrets and the powers they represented, and the means to improve human health and allow humans to survive to both undertake that work and to enjoy its fruits.

Science is a progressive activity. The outstanding peculiarity of man is that he stumbled onto the possibility of progressive activities. Such progress, the accumulation of experience from generation to generation, depended first on the development of language, then of writing and finally of printing. These allowed the accumulation of tradition and of knowledge, of the whole aura of cultural inheritance that surrounds us. This has so conditioned our existence that it is almost impossible for us to stop and examine the nature of our culture. We accept it as we accept the air we breathe; we are as unconscious of our culture as a fish, presumably, is of water.

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

No great advancement has ever been kept at bay because of ideology, nor greed. Eventually progress moves us forward.

I believe that science is the engine of prosperity, that if you look around at the wealth of civilization today, it's the wealth that comes from science.

Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.

As we gain more knowledge about materials and processes in the universe, that could open up benefits that we can't even imagine. But you have to be willing to fund science without knowledge of the benefits.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

The only barrier to human development is ignorance, and this is not insurmountable.

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