The corollary, one that the United States sometimes fails to grasp, is that abandoning science is the road back into poverty and backwardness.

If we continue to eschew science ... we are not going to move forward. We will not embrace natural laws. We will not make discoveries. We will not invent and innovate and stay ahead.

Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition.

Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles.

science can only take you so far and then you have to leap

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.

Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

When people start rejecting the fundamental understanding of the world that scientific process brings you, well, that's bad in my opinion.

I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?