Scientists - 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!

For me, research is a relief, a great diversion, a lure, a passion that can make me forget everything else. Like you, I am a man ignored and unknown, living in the fragile hope that someday I can pass on to future generations the fruits of my labors.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

That is the only way I ever heard of research going. I asked a question, devised some method of getting an answer, and got - a fresh question.Was this possible, or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him. You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires.

- H. G.Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed all true Scientists are.

- H. G.Wells, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

You men of the scientific world have long wanted to obtain control over mankind and its affairs.

- Harl Vincent, ''Rex'' (1934)

Great laws are not divined by flashes of inspiration, whatever you may think. It usually takes the combined work of a world full of scientists over a period of centuries.

- Isaac Asimov, ''Nightfall'' (1941)

A true scientist is married to his profession.

- Robert Charles, Return of the Ape Man (film, 1944)

You cold-blooded characters, you scientists, are the true visionaries. [. . .] If you strip all of the intermediate steps away from the scientist's thinking, you have an artistic concept to which the scientist responds distantly and with surprise.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Memorial'' (1946)

These physicists - they produce wonders but they never know what other wonders their wonders will beget.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Between Planets (1951)

Why can't you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing when there's no washing to do?

- Roger MacDougall, John Dighton, and Alexander Mackendrick, The Man in theWhite Suit (film, 1951)

The younger generation of scientists makes me sick to my stomach. Short order fry-cooks of destruction, they hear through the little window the dim order: ''Atom bomb rare, with cobalt 60!'' and sing it back and rattle their stinking skillets and sling the deadly hash - just what the customer ordered, with never a notion invading their smug, too-heated havens that there's a small matter of right and wrong that takes precedence even over their haute cuisine.

- C. M. Kornbluth, ''Gomez'' (1954)

The pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959)

As every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

- Arthur C. Clarke, ''Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination'' (1962)

I'm not foolish enough to hold opinions when I have insufficient data; I'll leave that folly to scientists.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold (1964)

When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite.

- James Gunn, ''The Listeners'' (1968)

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

- Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (film, 1984)

''You scientists are so shy,'' Rankin was saying. ''You love to hide your light under a bushel basket.''

- Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)

Naming was the power that made every human a scientist of sorts.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

Scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)