Charles Babbage Quotes

Whatever basic science resolves, at some stage it is of use to society. The problem is we do not know when or where.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

One can not impede scientific progress.

There really is only one story that you need to tell as a scientist or a technologist. It's Prometheus stealing fire. That's it. That's what we do as scientists or technologists.

May the work for the further development of chemical science, which has its strongest roots in this beautiful, strong and hard-working country of Sweden, continue to flourish in the future, for the promotion of culture and the benefit of mankind.

The ... progress of improvement and discovery ought not to be overlooked. ... Philosophy already directs her finger at sources of inexhaustible power. ... We are on the eve of mechanical discoveries still greater than any which have yet appeared.

I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.

So now, if we don't fund the physical sciences, where will the Next Big Thing come from?

The most important thing is to recognize that research is our seed corn. It's a national security priority. It's not just a way to have enough going on that graduate students can do their Ph.D.s and scientists can publish. We have to do research, or we'll fall behind the rest of the world.

Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.

By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.

Knowing how contented, free, and joyful is life in the world of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter its portals.

During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.

What scientist would not long to go on living, if only to see how the little truths he has brought to light will grow up?

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.

It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.