These scientific progress quotes will inspire you. Science makes progress when it discovers regularities in the ways phenomena change over time or finds evidence that supports, rules out, or leads to qualifications of possible explanations of these regularities.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging scientific progress quotes, scientific progress sayings, and scientific progress proverbs.
Best Scientific Progress Quotes
- “Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.” ~ Madame de Stael
- “Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.” ~ Brenda Ueland
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“I think mistakes are the essence of science and law. It’s impossible to conceive of either scientific progress or legal progress without understanding the important role of being wrong and of mistakes.” ~ Alan Dershowitz
- “If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.” ~ Rebecca Goldstein
- “The incorrectness and weaknesses of a theory cause other minds to formulate the problems more exactly and in this way scientific progress is made.” ~ Robert Barany
- “One can not impede scientific progress.” ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
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“The Nobel awards should be regarded as giving recognition to this general scientific progress as well as to the individuals involved.” ~ John Bardeen
- “Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.” ~ Ernst Mayr
- “I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.” ~ Marie Curie
- “The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.” ~ Norman Lockyer
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“Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.” ~ Freeman Dyson
- “Mankind’s survival is dependent on man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man’s squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ‘conceptual necessities,’ etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality.” ~ Francois Jacob
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“All scientific progress requires a climate of strong skepticism.” ~ Jerry A. Coyne
- “Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time.” ~ Edmund Hillary
- “In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.” ~ Werner Heisenberg
- “Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” ~ Vannevar Bush
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“The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.” ~ Gaston Bachelard
- “Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives. A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.” ~ Irving Langmuir
- “Of course, it’s always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling.” ~ George Pattison
- “There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences, or at least has not done so. There are other areas – so far, in fact, one area only [physics] – in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence.” ~ Paul Dirac
- “The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.” ~ Clayton Christensen
- “Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
- “It is important that legislation keeps pace with scientific progress.” ~ Robert Winston
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“Scientific Progress goes boink?” ~ Bill Watterson
- “Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.” ~ Thomas Kuhn
- “In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced sucess with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.” ~ Charles Lindbergh
- “Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity… The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable.” ~ Georges Lemaitre
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“The UN is committed to the goal of ensuring that all nations share in economic, social, & scientific progress. It delivers humanitarian assistance to the victims of wars and natural disasters.” ~ Bill Bradley
- “Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.” ~ Hannah Arendt
- “Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.” ~ Linus Pauling
- “What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.” ~ Paul Tournier
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“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” ~ Vannevar Bush
- “We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man” ~ Leonard Bernstein
- “I have suggested that scientific progress requires a favorable environment.” ~ Ernest Lawrence
- “If humans are organisms like every other organism – which they are – then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.” ~ Noam Chomsky
