Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet’s mind, or the painter’s, or the scientist’s, but of the mind of man.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre any day of the week that we want to give them their head.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.