Top 255 Scientist Quotes

I feel like I’m the same scientist I was back when I couldn’t get a grant. Now I’m that same person thinking that same way getting grants. That system of external rewards in science has always mystified me. It’s fickle. And I also don’t think it was constructed with people like me in mind.

To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be that binary.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last.

Dad and mom would have preferred that I be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or a great humanitarian.

A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.

There’s so much I’m interested in that I didn’t discover in high school. For ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I’m fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.

My secret weapon is my wife. She’s the best judge. She’s a scientist and a natural reader. We’ve developed a detailed code for how she marks a manuscript, and I think it’s what saves me from wild digressions.

I knew I wasn’t going to be a rocket scientist – let’s not be fools – but I wasn’t going to be a bum.

I always said I wanted to be scientist, but I didn’t really have the staying power.

One of the things that inspires me about working for Google is that when we solve a problem here, we can get that used by one million or even a billion people. That is very motivating as a computer scientist.

In big science, the role of the individual scientist must be carefully preserved. So is the one of original ideas and of contributions.

I think the hardest thing about making music now is being a great dad at the same time. There’s an insanity that goes with writing – a mad scientist thing that you have to go through – and sacrificing a kid’s upbringing to do that is not an option.

My brother is a scientist. He’s a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world.

One of the things I’ve learned that has made me very successful, I think, as a scientist in general, sometimes you just have to take a chance.

I am not the only scientist to be struck by the power and meaning of Lamium album in bloom.

‘Blowback,’ as many ‘Nation’ readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.

One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.

I wish to thank the Nobel Foundation for granting me the greatest honor to which a scientist may aspire.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can’t. Lions were my professor of photography.

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who’s a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn’t get home to help their kids with homework.

Recognition by one’s peers is the goal of every scientist.

When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission’s chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.

But I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.

You look at ‘Arrested Development’ or ‘Community,’ we’re constantly either deconstructing genre or tone. We like to say it’s like being a mad scientist: you get to play in a laboratory and experiment with directions to take narrative in.

Small science, which includes most research in the life sciences all over the world, is science directed usually by an individual senior scientist and a small team of junior associates, perhaps three, ten, fifteen, something in that order.

Everybody wants a movie career. I found that pretty elusive. I did make a movie with Martin Sheen about a nuclear scientist who has a religious experience. I don’t even know what it was called. I don’t think it was ever released.

As a child, I remember my own intensive interest in biology, birds, other animals and flowers and was determined at an early age to become a scientist.

Both my parents were amateur badminton players. My father is a scientist and wanted me to be a doctor. But my mom was very aggressive and loved badminton. She pushed me right from the age of nine to take up the sport.

I grew up obsessed with science fiction, and when I was really young, I wanted to be a scientist.

I’m actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

Being a scientist is a special privilege: for it brings the opportunity to be creative, the passionate quest for answers to nature’s most precious secrets, and the warm friendships of many valued colleagues.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

It can be very intense being an actor; it can be quite a small world. Then you speak to your friend who is a scientist and they have a completely different perspective.

I will not talk to journalists about anything that does not concern my work as a scientist or lecturer.

If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can’t realistically go unnoticed.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

I was a terrible science student, so I could never be a scientist; my mind doesn’t work that way. But I’ve learned to love the stories around science, and I have so much respect and fascination for the people who can make discoveries and find applications. There’s a lot of drama there.

I think being a scientist is a position of respect and power and access, and it’s a privileged position in society. And I think there are fundamental mechanisms that keep men and women from achieving the same level of power and access and privilege in society.

I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the president, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that’s not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

Take the perspective of a journalist or scientist. Really study what’s around you. What are people wearing, what do the interiors of buildings look like, what noises do you hear? If you bring your analytical powers to bear, you can make almost anything interesting.

As a young boy, I was very interested – as I still am – in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I am as non-accepting of medical quackery and unscientific approaches as anybody else. I’ve grown up as a card-carrying scientist, and I know the power of science to answer questions, and for many questions I don’t know of anything better than scientific approaches to answer them.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

There is something about the mindset of a scientist that is different – an awareness of uncertainty, modeling, proof.

I’m often asked – and occasionally in an accusatory way – ‘Are you atheist?’ And it’s like, ‘You know, the only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist, all right?’ I don’t associate with movements. I’m not an ‘ism.’ I just – I think for myself.

Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

The scientist’s inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.

As a scientist, I play in the top league – the Olympics, the World Championships – and I want to be in the lead. As a runner, I set personal goals, and I want to push beyond my own personal limits. I was very happy when I practiced for several months and then reached my goal to run a marathon in 2:50.

The daily calendar seemed, to me, like a kind of cartoon black hole, and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that that couldn’t be sustained indefinitely. That’s why I pulled the plug on that one after the ’02 edition. Kind of a preemptive strike.