Scientific Impact Quotes

It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.

I had imagined doing nuclear physics and cosmic ray work in greater style in peace time. To do modern physics in a small way is of no use of all.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

James Clerk Maxwell's [work is the] most profound and the most fruitful.

Science has killed religion. There's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.

A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he - she - is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science.

I've always felt that the Nobel Prize gives me nothing as far as science is concerned.

The relation of evolution to man has so far been a very much more complex and disturbing matter than the relation of gravitation to man. Its significance in relation to the very existence of man is pregnant with opportunities for trouble. Emotions, traditions, old beliefs, religion, and especially formal theology, are involved. Our anthropocentric system of world philosophy, outgrowth of centuries of self-worship, feels itself assailed. The reaction is one of anger and fear. Is man after all not a unique, specially created being, around whom and for whom an all-powerful Creator has produced the rest of life and the world? Evolution comes as the iconoclast to rob man of his sacred isolation.

The Physicist was the darling of the cold war …atomic energy was responsible for so much of the politics of the Cold War.

The media plays up celebrity a lot, but it doesn't hold a candle to being a scientist. There's a lot to be said for what they all do, and are trying to accomplish.

Man has existed for about a million years. He has possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agriculture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the belief of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human life.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Sometimes I make an analogy that each scientific paper is like putting out another record. And some people have careers that are nothing but a one-hit wonder. And then there are people who are only appreciated by aficionados but largely forgotten by the wider community.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

Scientific civilisation has destroyed the soul of the world.

I would still very much love to change the world, and there are three or four neurological diseases that I've got a personal grudge against. I wouldn't mind mopping them up in one amazing experiment to come out of my lab, and I certainly wouldn't mind transforming hundreds of thousands of people's lives overnight with some discovery.

If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on mankind the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

If I may take the liberty to speak for science at least, today his name and his prizes are without a peer in the world. He not only elevates science but he influences it as well.

Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.

No scientific subject has ever aroused quite the same mixture of hopes and fears [as atomic energy].

There are worse sins for a scientist than to be wrong. One is to be trivial