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: “A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Self-Conscious

Self-Conscious Quotes (3 quotes)

In recent years scientists have grown self-conscious, perhaps because they have only lately become of age. They realize that they are now part of the drama of human history, and they look to the professional historian for background and perspective.
(1932). Epigraph, without citation, in I. Bernard Cohen, Science, Servant of Man: A Layman's Primer for the Age of Science (1948), 1.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Background (44)  |  Become (821)  |  Drama (24)  |  Historian (59)  |  History (716)  |  Human (1512)  |  Look (584)  |  Perspective (28)  |  Professional (77)  |  Realize (157)  |  Recent (78)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Self (268)  |  Year (963)

Included in this ‘almost nothing,’ as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet–an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasps nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Accept (198)  |  Afterthought (6)  |  Being (1276)  |  Both (496)  |  Bush (11)  |  Core (20)  |  Definition (238)  |  Development (441)  |  Distort (22)  |  Embed (7)  |  Evolutionary (23)  |  First (1302)  |  Frame (26)  |  Geological (11)  |  Grasp (65)  |  Include (93)  |  Intelligence (218)  |  Invention (400)  |  Involve (93)  |  Joy (117)  |  Kind (564)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Language (308)  |  Last (425)  |  Limit (294)  |  Literature (116)  |  Little (717)  |  Mammalian (3)  |  Mentality (5)  |  Million (124)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Odd (15)  |  Other (2233)  |  Perception (97)  |  Planet (402)  |  Possession (68)  |  Propensity (9)  |  Receive (117)  |  Self (268)  |  Story (122)  |  Tale (17)  |  Trade (34)  |  Transmit (12)  |  Twig (15)  |  Uniqueness (11)  |  Unpredictable (18)  |  World (1850)  |  Year (963)

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most ‘obvious,’ ‘accurate,’ and ‘natural’ style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Accurate (88)  |  Arise (162)  |  Art (680)  |  Benighted (2)  |  Complex (202)  |  Context (31)  |  Creature (242)  |  Define (53)  |  Draw (140)  |  Drawing (56)  |  Easily (36)  |  Environment (239)  |  Evolutionary (23)  |  Experiment (736)  |  First (1302)  |  History (716)  |  Human (1512)  |  Improvement (117)  |  Interaction (47)  |  Invention (400)  |  Little (717)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Most (1728)  |  Must (1525)  |  Natural (810)  |  Novel (35)  |  Obvious (128)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Poor (139)  |  Possibility (172)  |  Record (161)  |  Regulate (11)  |  Self (268)  |  Social (261)  |  Solution (282)  |  Solution. (53)  |  Species (435)  |  Struggle (111)  |  Style (24)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Win (53)


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.