Science

"I mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world — to be able to gain control over diseases, over the human body, over the environment, over rivers and animals and forests. You have to submit a grant to somebody to fund, it all comes down to money, in many cases. It’s also an institution- If you’re a freelance scientist, you just explore the truth. Okay. But in an institution, a university, you need money to finance so you submit a research grant, and you have to convince the authority not of the truth. You have to convince the authority that what you want to do will somehow make us more powerful. Will somehow enable us to produce a new weapon. Will somehow enable us to produce more food. Will somehow enable us to gain control over previously uncontrollable, or deadly disease. And this is really what gets the money. Of course, it means to also be truth to some extent. Does it work and who wants it?" Yuval Noah Harari

"Science and science fiction are essentially the same." William Shatner

"Physics has lost its grip on the ground. For every anomaly, scientists pull a new parameter out of a hat instead of trying to understand the underlying principles. They have accumulated more than 30 "natural constants": all values that no one can explain." Alexander Unzicker

"We do not know whether we are on the right track and whether we are even asking the right experimental questions. But we have no choice but to continue with all our might." Lawrence Maxwell Krauss

"We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it? ... Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along." Carl Sagan

"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders." John Taylor Gatto

"In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific." George Bernard Shaw

"The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act." Walter Lippmann

"If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition." Graham Hancock

"To be scientific, that is to know what one knows and what one does not know; unscientific is dogmatic knowledge. To be scientific is to know with reasons; to accept ready-made opinions is unscientific. Scientific is the knowledge with the consciousness of the respectively determined limits of the knowledge; unscientific is all total knowledge, as if one knew in the whole. Scientific is boundless criticism and self-criticism, the advancing questioning; unscientific is the concern that doubt could paralyze. Scientific is the methodical course, which step by step on the ground of experience penetrates to the decision; unscientific is the play of multiple opinions and possibilities and the murmuring." Karl Jaspers

"In entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the student’s first endeavours ought to be, to prepare his mind for the reception of truth, by dismissing, or at least loosening his hold on, all such crude and hastily adopted notions respecting the objects and relations he is about to examine as may tend to embarrass or mislead him.; and to strengthen himself, by something of an effort and a resolve, for the unprejudiced admission of any conclusion which shall appear to be supported by careful observation and logical argument, even should it prove of a nature adverse to notions he may have previously formed for himself, or taken up, without examination, on the credit of others." John Frederick William Herschel

"The knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the knowledge of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is objective - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined... and fed into a process, now called decision-making. This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people." Ivan Illich

"The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else." Noam Chomsky

"…Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought. Scientists fall in line with the dominant power structure. They have to, because the power structure pays the bills. You don’t play ball with the power structure, you don’t get money for research, you don’t get an appointment, you don’t get published, in short you don’t count anymore. You’re out. You might as well be dead." Michael Crichton