John F. Kennedy Quotes

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

American research and resources have literally changed the face of humanity, by tackling deadly and once-deadly diseases.

If we stop exploring space, we're going to lose the same part of us that found vaccines and penicillin, the part that searches for cures to cancer and AIDS.

Science is one of the comparative advantages of our knowledge-based economy, and focusing on our prowess in providing better tools to address diseases of poverty is one of the best forms of foreign aid.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

There are three stages of truth. First is that it can't be true, and that's what they said. “You couldn't immunize against polio with a killed-virus vaccine.” Second phase: they say, "Well, if it's true, it's not very important. And the third stage is, 'Well, we've known it all along.

Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health. Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.

I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets and, therefore, that our little earth is unique. Once we admit that the other stars probably also have planets, at any rate a goodly proportion of them, it is more than likely that a large fraction of these will be the right size to keep on their surface water and, possibly, an atmosphere of some sort; and, furthermore, at the proper distance from their parent sun, to maintain a suitable temperature.

All we can say is that with hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible. If we are sufficiently self-centered and choose to deny that any of these support life, no one can prove we are wrong. But I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.

Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.

Space is where great scientific and commercial breakthroughs of the future will be made. Space is where we can achieve progress in making our country safer from ballistic missile attack. Space is also where medicines of the future will be made, and where some of our children may make their living.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.

Thanks to malaria elimination efforts in United States in the 1940s, most people in the U.S. today have never had any direct contact with the disease, and most doctors have never seen a case. That success means it's easy to have a relaxed attitude about protecting ourselves.

Just like some day, say, 1000 years from now, when we can go to another star and see a planet, that's what we would do because we will know how to cure cancer, cure birth defects, so we would teach them.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.

As always, space remains an unforgiving frontier, and the skies overhead will surely present obstacles and setbacks that must be overcome. But hard challenges demand fresh approaches, and I'm optimistic that Stratolaunch will yield transformative benefits - not only for scientists and space entrepreneurs, but for all of us.

With modern medicine prolonging life no matter what condition you're in, it seems like we're working towards immortality by science.

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

We are a fighting nation, continually struggling to overcome diseases from within... and to face up to foreign intervention from without.

I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous - to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.

All these things that we've contemplated, whether it's space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems.