Isaac Asimov Quotes

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

We have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not.

We've got to dumb America up again.

We are in a war on ignorance, a war on scientific ignorance.

Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.

The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher… Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him …

The more people are exposed to science, the more we will move away from superstition.

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.

If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate. Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

If we reject science, we reject the common man.

More than a century has passed since science laid down sound propositions as to the origins of the universe, but how many have mastered them or possess the really scientific spirit of criticism? A few thousands at the outside, who are lost in the midst of hundreds of millions still steeped in prejudices and superstitions worthy of savages, who are consequently ever ready to serve as puppets for religious impostors.

Faith is a poison that paralyzes the mind. In all the days of your life, seek knowledge!