Scientist Quotes

Having wires strewn across your couch and across the floor is a big deal to a lot of people.

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.

Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.

My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

The study of Nature is intercourse with the Highest Mind. You should never trifle with Nature.

The glacier was God's great plough set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth.

Study nature, not books.

Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law.

Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

I cannot afford to waste my time making money.

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

I have started that which the country will not willingly let die.

The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.

It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.