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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Science and technology: Sample quotations
Louis Agassiz
Swiss palaeontologist
Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it.
[Attributed remark]
Erwin Chargaff
Czech-born US biochemist
Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'
[Columbia Forum 1969]
Francis Crick
English molecular biologist
If you want to understand function, study structure.
[What Mad Pursuit (1988)]
Albert Einstein
German-born US physicist
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
[Reflecting on his role in the development of the atom bomb, New Statesman.]
Stephen Hawking
English physicist
A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought.
[A Brief History of Time 1988]
Charles A Lindbergh
US aviator
I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
[Time 26 May 1967]
Robert May
Australian scientist, chief scientific advisor to the UK government, and research professor in zoology, Oxford University,
England
We share half our genes with the banana.
[After the announcement in July 2000 that a working draft of the genetic sequence of humans had been completed by the Human
Genome Project.]
Isaac Newton
English physicist and mathematician
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
[Quoted in L T More Isaac Newton]
Jonas Salk
US physician and microbiologist
The people – could you patent the Sun?
[On being asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine]
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