"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."

— Werner von Braun

"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist."

— Albert Einstein

"Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions."

— Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary

"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything."

— Greg Easterbrook

"If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment."

— Ernest Rutherford

"When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction."

— Steven Wright

"Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month."

— Wernher von Braun

"The Union of Concerned Scientists says the Bush administration manipulates and suppresses science. The administration points out that the Union of Bought and Paid for Scientists disagrees."

— fark.com

"No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer."

— Thomas Browne (1605-82), English physician and writer

"Should we force science down the throats of those that have no taste for it? Is it our duty to drag them kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century ? I am afraid that it is."

— George Porter (1920- ), British chemist

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

— Stephen Leacock

"Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"

— Kelvin Throop III

"When science finally locates the center of the universe, some people will be surprised to learn they're not it."

— Bernard Bailey

"Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?"

— Scott Adams (Dilbert)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

— Albert Einstein

"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."

— R. Buckminster Fuller

"There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment."

— P. D. James

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry, and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers."

— Lewis Thomas

"Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war, it seems more like astrology."

— Rebecca West

"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it."

— Frank Herbert, author of Dune

"Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."

— G. K. Chesterton

"We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead."

— D.H. Lawrence

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

— Albert Einstein

"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

— Doctor Who

"The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize."

— Frederic Joliot-Curie

"The essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer."

— Jacob Bronowski

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

— Albert Einstein

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

— E. W. Dijkstra

"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof."

— Ashley Montague

"The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

— Thomas H. Huxley

"I didn't think; I experimented."

— Anthony Burgess

"Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?"

— Oliver Heaviside, English physicist

"There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea."

— Percy Williams Bridgman, US physicist

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

— Albert Einstein

"Some things need to be believed to be seen."

— Guy Kawasaki