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I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so muc...more

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If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

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...We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the the...more

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There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Me...more

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To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

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Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselve...more

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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

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John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who ...more

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One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful ...more

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Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

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Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after ...more

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I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unr...more

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It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries.. are lives too long to risk and too comfortabl...more

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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.