Science - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

- Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), translated by William Butcher (1992)

If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will. But - there must be risks! There must be. In experimental work there always are!

- H. G.Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)

''It's this accursed Science,'' I cried. ''It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it - and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.''

- H. G.Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)

Science of to-day - the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow - superstition of to-day.

- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919)

The superstitions of today are the scientific facts of tomorrow.

- Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, Dracula (play, 1927)

Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

There are no enemies in science, professor, only phenomena to study.

- Charles Lederer, The Thing (from AnotherWorld) (film, 1951)

This was what the universities were turning out nowadays. The scienceis- a-sacred-cow boys. People who believe you could pour mankind into a test tube, titrate it, and come up with all the answers to the problems of the human race.

- Frank M. Robinson, ''The Day theWorld Ended'' (1953)

The men of the frontier knew - but how was a girl from Earth to fully understand? H amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination. To himself and her brother and parents she was a sweet-faced girl in her teens; to the laws of nature she was x, the unwanted factor in a cold equation.

- Tom Godwin, ''The Cold Equations'' (1954)

I'm not disparaging scientists.What they do is as it should be; I grok that fully. But what they are after is not what I am looking for - you don't grok a desert by counting its grains of sand.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Science is not a sacred cow - but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds.

- JohnW. Campbell, Jr., introduction to Prologue to Analog (1962)

I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein . . . That fragment of a ''creed for materialism'' which a friend in college had once shown to him rose through Donald's confused mind.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and your instruments, but in the end your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

- Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (1969)

''Archaeology is made up entirely of anomalies,'' said Terrence, ''rearranged to make them fit in a fluky pattern. There'd be no system to it otherwise.'' ''Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit.''

- R. A. Lafferty, ''Continued on Next Rock'' (1970)

When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.

- Poul Anderson, ''The Queen of Air and Darkness'' (1971)

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology.When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, ''My God what have I done?''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Stalin in the Soul'' (1973)

Science battered everyone into submission if it was given its way.

- Thomas M. Disch, 334 (1974)

Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

The real name for ''science'' is magic.

- Harlan Ellison, ''Jeffty Is Five'' (1977)

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

- GeneWolfe, ''Seven American Nights'' (1978)

Once the data are in, the theory has to follow along meekly.

- Michael Swanwick, ''Ginungagap'' (1980)

''Matter dreams,'' an instructor had said a decade before. ''Dreams it is real, maintains the dream by shifting rules with constant results. Disturb the dreams, the shifting of the rules results in inconstant results. Things cannot hold.''

- Greg Bear, ''Hardfought'' (1983)

Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.

- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1985)

Atoms have a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons bound together. Around this nucleus shells of electrons spin, and each shell is either full or trying to get full, to balance with the number of protons - to balance the positive and negative charges. An atom is like a human heart, you see.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, ''The Lunatics'' (1988)

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

- Alan Dean Foster, CyberWay (1990)

science: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does religion, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

- Terry Pratchett, Wings (1990)

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved.

- Ellen Klages, ''Time Gypsy'' (1998)

Astronomy, Benjamin mused, was a lot like a detective story with the clues revealed first, and the actual body only later - if ever.

- Gregory Benford, Eater (2000)