Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Scientists - Page 5

As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.

Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work.

The food we eat goes beyond its macronutrients of carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's information. It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression.

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.

Scandal dies sooner of itself, than we could kill it.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

Wireless is freedom. It's about being unleashed from the telephone cord and having the ability to be virtually anywhere when you want to be.

I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life.

I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations.

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.

Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.

It's important to celebrate your failures as much as your successes. If you celebrate your failures really well, and if you get to the motto and say, 'Wow, I failed, I tried, I was wrong, I learned something,' then you realize you have no fear, and when your fear goes away, you can move the world.

Man cannot influence in this respect the atomic forces of Nature.

I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal.

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.

Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of 'experiments' banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.

All the leadership positions that I have had have one common denominator: none has required that I give up my science work.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.

So-called 'sustainable development'... is meaningless drivel.

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

One of the best aspects of health care reform is it starts to emphasize prevention.

Death is the cure for all diseases.

A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

I cannot afford to waste my time making money.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.

As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions.

In today's world, America's soft power is commonly thought to reside in the global popularity of Hollywood movies, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Starbucks.

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

If the assumptions used in calculating energy are changed, then this seriously affects the final result, even though the same body of data might be used.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.

To repay evils with kindness is the religion I was taught to practise, and this will forever be my rule.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

People feel repressed by their own governments; they feel unfairly treated by the outside world; they wake up in the morning, and who do they see - they see people being shot and killed: all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.

I cannot imagine a more enjoyable place to work than in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where I work.

Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

Being nimble and ready to change our minds if need be is an attribute that is crucial to live and thrive in a society that is powered by science and technology, both as an individual and as an engaged citizen.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Our - our friends can't trust us anymore. You know, Ukraine was a nuclear-armed state. They gave away their nuclear arms with the understanding that we would protect them. We won't even give them offensive weapons.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.