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: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index W > Category: Witchcraft

Witchcraft Quotes (6 quotes)

Almost every major systematic error which has deluded men for thousands of years relied on practical experience. Horoscopes, incantations, oracles, magic, witchcraft, the cures of witch doctors and of medical practitioners before the advent of modern medicine, were all firmly established through the centuries in the eyes of the public by their supposed practical successes. The scientific method was devised precisely for the purpose of elucidating the nature of things under more carefully controlled conditions and by more rigorous criteria than are present in the situations created by practical problems.
Personal Knowledge (1958), 183.
Science quotes on:  |  Advent (7)  |  Care (203)  |  Carefully (65)  |  Century (319)  |  Circumstance (139)  |  Condition (362)  |  Control (182)  |  Criteria (6)  |  Cure (124)  |  Deluded (7)  |  Delusion (26)  |  Devising (7)  |  Doctor (191)  |  Elucidation (7)  |  Error (339)  |  Establishment (47)  |  Experience (494)  |  Eye (440)  |  Horoscope (6)  |  Incantation (6)  |  Magic (92)  |  Major (88)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Method (531)  |  Modern (402)  |  More (2558)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Nature Of Things (30)  |  Oracle (5)  |  Practical (225)  |  Practicality (7)  |  Practitioner (21)  |  Precisely (93)  |  Present (630)  |  Problem (731)  |  Public (100)  |  Purpose (336)  |  Reliance (11)  |  Rigor (29)  |  Rigorous (50)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Method (200)  |  Situation (117)  |  Success (327)  |  Supposition (50)  |  System (545)  |  Systematic (58)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Through (846)  |  Witch Doctor (2)  |  Year (963)

Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
In James Wood, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893), 128:24.
Science quotes on:  |  Art (680)  |  Devil (34)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Existence (481)  |  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (150)  |  Modern (402)  |  Modern Science (55)  |  Most (1728)  |  Personage (4)  |  Sneer (9)  |  Thing (1914)

I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.
Final remarks to the Court after the jury verdict was read at the Scopes Monkey Trial Eighth day's proceedings (21 Jul 1925) in John Thomas Scopes, The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case: a Complete Stenographic Report of the Famous Court Test of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, Including Speeches and Arguments of Attorneys (1925), 316.
Science quotes on:  |  America (143)  |  Back (395)  |  Best (467)  |  Case (102)  |  Dictum (10)  |  Fact (1257)  |  First (1302)  |  Force (497)  |  Modern (402)  |  Modern World (5)  |  People (1031)  |  Religious (134)  |  Remember (189)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Scopes Monkey Trial (9)  |  Test (221)  |  Think (1122)  |  Tide (37)  |  Trying (144)  |  Turn (454)  |  Will (2350)  |  World (1850)

It is well-known that both rude and civilized peoples are capable of showing unspeakable, and as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics, and are unhappily truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with the bloodthirsty exectioner of the Reign of Terror, since the former only satisfies his natural appetite in preying on other mammals. The atrocities of the trials for witchcraft, the indiscriminate slaughter committed by the negroes on the coast of Guinea, the sacrifice of human victims made by the Khonds, the dismemberment of living men by the Battas, find no parallel in the habits of animals in their savage state. And such a comparision is, above all, impossible in the case of anthropoids, which display no hostility towards men or other animals unless they are first attacked. In this respect the anthropid ape stands on a higher plane than many men.
Robert Hartmann, Anthropoid Apes, 294-295.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Animal (651)  |  Anthropoid (9)  |  Ape (54)  |  Appetite (20)  |  Attack (86)  |  Both (496)  |  Capable (174)  |  Characteristic (154)  |  Compare (76)  |  Cruelty (24)  |  Display (59)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Former (138)  |  Grave (52)  |  Habit (174)  |  Hostility (16)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Nature (71)  |  Impossible (263)  |  Inexorable (10)  |  Known (453)  |  Living (492)  |  Logic (311)  |  Mammal (41)  |  Mistake (180)  |  Natural (810)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Other (2233)  |  Parallel (46)  |  People (1031)  |  Reign (24)  |  Respect (212)  |  Result (700)  |  Sacrifice (58)  |  Stand (284)  |  State (505)  |  Term (357)  |  Terror (32)  |  Trial (59)  |  Truly (118)  |  Victim (37)  |  World (1850)

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Century (319)  |  Polygraph (2)  |  Test (221)

We are about to move into the Aquarian age of clearer thinking. Astrology and witchcraft both have a contribution to make to the new age, and it behooves the practitioners of both to realize their responsibilities and ob­ligations to the science and the religion.
In Diary of a Witch (1969), 186.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Astrology (46)  |  Behoove (6)  |  Both (496)  |  Contribution (93)  |  Move (223)  |  New (1273)  |  New Age (6)  |  Obligation (26)  |  Practitioner (21)  |  Realize (157)  |  Religion (369)  |  Responsibility (71)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Thinking (425)


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.