If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition tha...t man's sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.... Making sense of the world and one's place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.... We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our most characteristically human trait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we h...ave made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In opening your doors to woman, it is mind that will enter the lecture room, it is intelligence that will ask for food; sex will n...ever be felt where science leads for the atmosphere of thought will be around every lecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-g...ranted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we--because we don't question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made... any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today--but the core of s...cience fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20...th century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked ...for no spell to cast over nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, th...ey do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »