TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Politics is more difficult than physics.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index D > Category: Dishonesty

Dishonesty Quotes (9 quotes)

[There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away.
[Coining the term “pathological science” for the self-deceiving application of science to a phenomenon that doesn't exist.]
From a Colloquium at The Knolls Research Laboratory (18 Dec 1953). Transcribed and edited by R. N. Hall. In General Electric Laboratories, Report No. 68-C-035 (April 1968).
Science quotes on:  |  Application (257)  |  Astray (13)  |  Attention (196)  |  Being (1276)  |  Deal (192)  |  Deceiving (5)  |  Do (1905)  |  Effect (414)  |  Exist (458)  |  False (105)  |  Gradually (102)  |  Great (1610)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Being (185)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Interaction (47)  |  Involved (90)  |  Lack (127)  |  Last (425)  |  Paper (192)  |  Pathological (21)  |  People (1031)  |  Phenomenon (334)  |  Research (753)  |  Result (700)  |  Self (268)  |  Self-Deception (2)  |  Subjective (20)  |  Term (357)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Threshold (11)  |  Trick (36)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Usually (176)  |  Way (1214)  |  Wishful (6)  |  Year (963)

I stand before you as somebody who is both physicist and a priest, and I want to hold together my scientific and my religious insights and experiences . I want to hold them together, as far as I am able, without dishonesty and without compartmentalism. I don’t want to be a priest on Sunday and a physicist on Monday; I want to be both on both days.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Both (496)  |  Experience (494)  |  Far (158)  |  Hold (96)  |  Insight (107)  |  Monday (3)  |  Physicist (270)  |  Priest (29)  |  Religious (134)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Somebody (8)  |  Stand (284)  |  Sunday (8)  |  Together (392)  |  Want (504)

Knowledge is a matter of science, and no dishonesty or conceit whatsoever is permissible. What is required is definitely the reverse—honesty and modesty.
In Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (1966, 1972), 310.
Science quotes on:  |  Conceit (15)  |  Honesty (29)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Matter (821)  |  Modesty (18)  |  Permissible (9)  |  Required (108)  |  Reverse (33)  |  Whatsoever (41)

Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.
In The Decline and Fall of Science (1976).
Science quotes on:  |  Clarity (49)  |  Lack (127)  |  Sign (63)

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.
In Fact and Faith (1934), vi.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Affair (29)  |  Angel (47)  |  Assumption (96)  |  Atheist (16)  |  Career (86)  |  Course (413)  |  Devil (34)  |  Dishonest (7)  |  Experiment (736)  |  God (776)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Interfere (17)  |  Interference (22)  |  Justification (52)  |  Practice (212)  |  Profession (108)  |  Professional (77)  |  Say (989)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Set (400)  |  Success (327)  |  Word (650)  |  World (1850)

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn math and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. (1981)
Quoted in K.P. Yaday and Malti Sundram, Encyclopaedia Of Child And Primary Education Development, Vol. 2, 99.
Science quotes on:  |  Call (781)  |  Child (333)  |  Children (201)  |  Criticism (85)  |  Criticize (7)  |  Dishonest (7)  |  Do (1905)  |  Education (423)  |  Effective (68)  |  Infantile (3)  |  Job (86)  |  Know (1538)  |  Learn (672)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  More (2558)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Passive (8)  |  People (1031)  |  School (227)  |  Spelling (8)  |  Teaching (190)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)

The greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. … it is the style that creates the illusion of content, and which is a cause as well as merely a symptom of Teilhard's alarming apocalyptic seizures.
Medawar’s acerbic book review of The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin first appeared as 'Critical Notice' in the journal Mind (1961), 70, No. 277, 99. The book review was reprinted in The Art of the Soluble: Creativity and Originality in Science (1967), 71. Medawar thus strongly contradicted other reviewers of the book, which he said was “widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year—one, the Book of the Century.”
Science quotes on:  |  Alarming (4)  |  Author (175)  |  Cause (561)  |  Conceit (15)  |  Create (245)  |  Deceive (26)  |  Deceiving (5)  |  Excuse (27)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greater (288)  |  Ground (222)  |  Himself (461)  |  Illusion (68)  |  Merely (315)  |  Metaphysical (38)  |  Metaphysics (53)  |  Nonsense (48)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pain (144)  |  Show (353)  |  Symptom (38)  |  Tedious (15)  |  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (30)  |  Trick (36)  |  Variety (138)

Today when the public thinks of the products of science it is likely to think about environmental problems, an unproductive armament industry, careless or dishonest 'scientific' reports, Livermore cheers for 'nukes forever' and a huge amount of self-serving noise on every subject from global warming to 'the face of God'.
'Hard Times', Physics Today (Oct 1992), 45, 9.
Science quotes on:  |  Amount (153)  |  Atomic Bomb (115)  |  Climate Change (76)  |  Dishonest (7)  |  Environment (239)  |  Face (214)  |  Forever (111)  |  Global (39)  |  Global Warming (29)  |  God (776)  |  Industry (159)  |  Noise (40)  |  Problem (731)  |  Product (166)  |  Publication (102)  |  Science And Society (25)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Self (268)  |  Serving (15)  |  Subject (543)  |  Think (1122)  |  Today (321)  |  Warming (24)

Whether or not you agree that trimming and cooking are likely to lead on to downright forgery, there is little to support the argument that trimming and cooking are less reprehensible and more forgivable. Whatever the rationalization is, in the last analysis one can no more than be a bit dishonest than one can be a little bit pregnant. Commit any of these three sins and your scientific career is in jeopardy and deserves to be.
Honour in Science (1984), 14.
Science quotes on:  |  Analysis (244)  |  Argument (145)  |  Career (86)  |  Commit (43)  |  Cooking (12)  |  Deserve (65)  |  Dishonest (7)  |  Forgery (3)  |  Forgive (12)  |  Last (425)  |  Lead (391)  |  Little (717)  |  More (2558)  |  Pregnant (4)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Sin (45)  |  Support (151)  |  Whatever (234)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.