Science Quotes to Make
You Think
General Science
Writing Integration
Grades 6 to 12
These quotes can be posted in
the classroom, or used as writing prompts. Challenge students
to agree or disagree with the sentiment expressed.
Plants, instead of affecting the
air in the same manner as animal respiration, reverse the effect
of breathing and tend to keep the atmosphere sweet and wholesome.
-Joseph Priestly
The greatest service which can be
rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture;
especially, a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil.
-Thomas Jefferson
In science the important thing is
to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
-Herbert Spencer
True science teaches, above all,
to doubt and be ignorant.
-Miguel de Unamuno
Every individual alive today, the
highest as well as the lowest, is derived in an unbroken line
from the first and lowest forms.
-August Frederick Leopold Weismann
One hundred trout are needed to
support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume
90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that
live off of 1,000 tons of grass.
-G. Tyler Miller, Jr.
On the Smithsonian Institution:
I am tired of all this thing called
science here....We have spent millions in that sort of thing
for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.
- Senator Simon Cameron, 1901
We prefer economic growth to clean
air.
- Charles Barden
One humiliating thing about science
is that it is gradually filling our homes with appliances smarter
than we are.
- Anonymous
There is something fascinating about
science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of
such a trifling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi,
1874
I object to dividing the study of
living processes into botany, zoology, and microbiology because
by any such arrangement, the interrelations within the biological
community get lost. Corals cannot be studied without reference
to the algae that live with them; flowering plants without the
insects that pollinate them; grasslands without the grazing animals.
-Marston Bates
Destroying species is like tearing
pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly
know how to read, about the place where they live.
-Robert Holmes III
Science when well digested is nothing
but good sense and reason.
-Stanislaw Leszczynski
Equipped with his five senses, man
explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
-Edwin Powel Hubble
You can observe a lot just by watching.
-Yogi Berra
Chance favors the trained mind.
-Louis Pasteur
It is not so much that the cells
make the plant; it is rather that the plant makes the cells.
-Heinrich Anton de Bary
The structure of tissues and their
functions, are two aspects of the same thing.
-Alexis Carroll
Anatomy is to physiology as geography
to history; it describes the theatre of events.
-Jean Fernel
No amount of experimentation can
ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
-Albert Ei
Facts are not science-as the dictionary
is not literature.
-Martin H. Fischer
Earth, the only truly closed ecosystem
any of us knows, is an organism.
-Lewis Thomas
Freedom to breed will bring ruin
to all.
-Garett Hardin
Few scientists are willing to jeopardize
their research funds by publicly criticizing EPA's interpretation
of the scientific record.
-Roy Gould
The significant chemicals of living
tissue are rickety and unstable, which is exactly what is needed
for life.
-Isaac Asimov
The outcome of any serious research
can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
-Thorstein Veblen
How can I know what I think till
I see what I say?
-Graham Wallas
The aims of scientific thought are
to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
-Alfred North Whitehead
It is vain to do with more what
can be done with less. [Occam's Razor]
-William of Occam, 1300-1349
We don't know one millionth of one
percent of anything.
-Albert Einstein
The main conclusion arrived at in
this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized
form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many.
But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
-Charles Darwin
I have long felt that biology ought
to seem as exciting as a mystery story, for a mystery story is
exactly what biology is.
-Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish
Gene"
Every scientific fulfillment raises
new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
-Max Weber
Most institutions demand unqualified
faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
-Robert K. Merton
All that we see or seem is but a
dream within a dream.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Mathematics is the door and the
key to the sciences.
-Roger Bacon, 1220-1292 AD.
A hen is only an egg's way of making
another egg.
-Samuel Butler
That which is not good for the beehive,
cannot be good for the bees.
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 121-180
AD
Caminante, no hay camino
Se hace camino al andar.
Traveller, there is no path,
Paths are made by walking.
-Antonio Machado, 1875-1939 (popular
song)
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