Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Researchers

We change people, but oftentimes we get so focused on the negative people and their influence on us, we forget how powerful we are as positive people to influence others.

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists. I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values.

The way you can understand all of the Social Media is as the creation of a new kind of public space.

When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.

Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.

Our job is not to answer questions, its to ask the right questions...that get us to the right answer.

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.

All experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.

Advances are Made by Answering Questions. Discoveries are Made by Questioning Answers.

Libertarianism is the simple morality we learned as children: Don’t strike first, don’t steal or cheat, keep your promises. If you inadvertently fail to live up to these standards, make it up to the person you’ve harmed. If someone harms you, you may defend yourself as needed to stop the aggressor and obtain reparations. This simple morality works group-to-group just as it works one-to-one to bring about a peaceful and prosperous world.

The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.

Real magic is not about gaining power over others: it is about gaining power over yourself.

If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning.

Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.

The pressures for human cloning are powerful; but, although it seems likely that somebody, at some time, will attempt it, we need not assume that it will ever become a common or significant feature of human life.

There are two kinds of people who lose money: those who know nothing and those who know everything.

Persons living in this modern world who do not know the basic facts that determine their very existence, functioning, and surroundings, are living in a dream world. Such persons are, in a very real sense, not sane.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.

Information is power. If you have information about the whole planet you have power over the whole planet. By knowing what people do in Germany they, of course, have power over them.

The Boeing 747 is the commuter train of the global village.

Community leadership is the courage, creativity and capacity to inspire participation, development and sustainability for strong communities.

The free market is constantly under attack from those who believe that they know how to make the world a better place with properly administered doses of state coercion.

[The] amount of search is not a measure of the amount of intelligence being exhibited. What makes a problem a problem is not that a large amount of search is required for its solution, but that a large amount would be required if a requisite level of intelligence were not applied.

We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. ... The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.

The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.

Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead to the acceptance of cooperation as a guiding principle both in social theory and as a basis for human behavior. Such a development when it occurs will alter the course of human history.

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.

We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened.

Don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity and passion.

If children are apparently unable to learn, we should assume that we have not as yet found the right way to teach them.

There are no causes of poverty. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes coldit is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. We should ask, ‘what are the causes of wealth?’

Not being a poet, I prize truth above beauty.

The network is the computer.

Compared to Nature we suffer a poverty of imagination; it is thus much easier for us to uncover than to invent.

Bosons love to come together; fermions can't stand each other

The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.

Emotional function and cognitive function aren't unrelated to each other. They're completely intertwined.

An ecovillage is a human scale, full-featured settlement which integrates human activities harmlessly into the natural environment, supports healthy development and can be continued into the indefinite future.

There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA. What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so that we can build anything.

Method helps intuition when it is not transformed into dictatorship. Intuition augments method if it does not instill anarchy. In every moment of our semiotic existence, method and intuition complement one another.

Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming?...The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

Moral certainty is never more than probability.

The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them - no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less.

Exposure to some pesticides during infancy, even at very low levels, can lead to serious life-long consequences if the pesticides disrupt hormone-driven developmental processes.

It's impracticable to halt the exponential advancement of technology.

We are like a judge confronted by a defendant who declines to answer, and we must determine the truth from the circumstantial evidence.

In geology we cannot dispense with conjectures: [but] because we are condemned to dream let us ensure that our dreams are like those of sane men-e.g. that they have their foundations in truth-and are not like the dreams of the sick, formed by strange combinations of phantasms, contrary to nature and therefore incredible.

The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.

The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct.

An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done.

We do not necessarily improve with age: for better or worse we become more like ourselves.

The planetary phase of history has begun, but the future shape of global society remains profoundly uncertain. Though perhaps improbable, a shift toward a planetary civilization of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability is still possible.

An interest in the brain requires no justification other than a curiosity to know why we are here, what we are doing here, and where we are going.

There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.

If belief in evolution is a requirement to be a real scientist, it’s interesting to consider a quote from Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.

They should set a very clear priority for the government. There is such a large penumbra of issues. The party needs to come to grips with the reality that it has to be coherent politically.

Human life commences at the time of conception.

I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is no quite so simple.