Russell Baker

To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Science is but an image of the truth.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It’s billions to tens of billions.

It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.