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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index P > Category: Positively

Positively Quotes (4 quotes)

Society can, and does, and must control research enormously, negatively and positively, by selectively cutting off or supplying funds. At present it cuts—not so selectively. That is all right with me, as far as my own research is concerned. I certainly do not think society owes me a living or support for my research. If it does not support my research, I can always do something else and not be worse off, perhaps better. However, the question, from society's point of view, is exceedingly complicated.
In 'Homo Scientificus According to Beckett', collected in William Beranek, Jr. (ed.),Science, Scientists, and Society, (1972), 135-. Excerpted in Ann E. Kammer, Science, Sex, and Society (1979), 279.
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The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.
Søren Kierkegaard, translation by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong Søren Kierkegaard’s Journal and Papers (1834), 50.
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There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence of it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies? The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything. There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can’t positively disprove. On the whole, people don’t believe in most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God, together with whatever particular baggage goes with the religion of their parents.
From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 Apr 1992), published in the Independent newspaper. Included in excerpt in Alec Fisher, The Logic of Real Arguments (2004), 84. The full speech was reprinted in The Nullifidian, (Dec 1994). Transcribed online in the Richard Dawkins archive, article 89, titled: Lecture from 'The Nullifidian' (Dec 94).
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Albert Einstein quote: Mistrust of every kind of authority
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment–an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.
In P. A. Schilpp, (ed.), Part I, 'Autobiographical Notes', Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949, 1959), Vol. 1, 5. Translated by the P.A. Schilpp, from Einstein’s original German manuscript, written at age 67, (p.2, 4): “Durch Lesen populärwissenschaftlicher Bücher kam ich bald zu der Ueberzeugung, dass vieles in den Erzählungen der Bibel nicht wahr sein konnte. Die Folge war eine geradezu fanatische Freigeisterei, verbunden mit dem Eindruck, dass die Jugend vom Staate mit Vorbedacht belogen wird; es war ein niederschmetternder Eindruck. Das Misstrauen gegen jede Art Autorität erwuchs aus diesem Erlebnis, eine skeptische Einstellung gegen die Ueberzeugungen, welche in der jeweiligen sozialen Umwelt lebendig waren—eine Einstellung, die mich nicht wieder verlassen hat, wenn sie auch später durch bessere Einsicht in die kausalen Zusammenhänge ihre ursprünglische Schärfe verloren haben.”.
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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
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Sophie Germain
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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 -
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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
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- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
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Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
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- 20 -
Carl Sagan
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- 10 -
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