Previous Quotes of the Week(s)

May 20 - June 18, 2008
"I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets."--John Glenn


May 19 - May 24, 2008
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."--Howard Aiken


April 28 - May 18, 2008
"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."--Max Planck

April 20 - April 27, 2008
"No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." --John A. Wheeler

April 14 - April 19, 2008
"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." --Werner Heisenberg

April 7 - April 13, 2008
"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."--Sir Isaac Newton

March 31 - April 6, 2008
"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."--Sir Arthur C. Clarke

March 23 - March 30, 2008
"[P]hilosophy cannot create truth, nor can it reliably lead us to it. It can only demonstrate it rhetorically or didactically. Any philosophical argument is only as good as its premises, and the premises are only as good as their correspondence with reality. How do we know if a given statement corresponds with reality? Dingdingding! Science! Anything else and you're basing your premises on an infinite pile of other arguments and we devolve into intellectual incoherence."--Akusai

March 17 - March 22, 2008
"We are strangely made. We think we are wonderful creatures. Part of the time we think that, at any rate. And during that interval we consider with pride our mental equipment, with its penetration, its power of analysis, its ability to reason out clear conclusions from confused facts, and all the lordly rest of it; and then comes a rational interval and disenchants us. Disenchants us and lays us bare to ourselves, and we see that intellectually we are no great things; that we seldom really know the things we think we know; that our best-built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows."--Mark Twain

March 9 - March 16, 2008
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."--Stephen Hawking


March 1 - March 9, 2008
"I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest."--Max Born

Feb 23 - March 1, 2008
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"--Richard Feynman

Feb 17 - Feb 23, 2008
"The certainty that one is correct is the most reliable predictor of error, for knowledge stems from scientific methodology and certainty is anathema to such inquiry."—Steven Novella (source)

Feb 10 - Feb 16, 2008
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan

Feb 3 - Feb 9, 2008
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."--Edwin Hubble

Jan 27 - Feb 2, 2008
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold."--Isaac Asimov