"I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.“
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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"Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff."
-Joel Edgerton
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"I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it."
-Diane Cilento
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"Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts."
-Brian Aldiss
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"We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space."
-Nick Lampson
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"The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development."
-John Desmond Bernal
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"The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun."
-John Desmond Bernal
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