Enrico Fermi Quotes

There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

I have always felt that, aside from research that violates universal human mores, when it comes to technological applications, that which can be done will be done.

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

We think that it is the best scientists working in the frontier fields of science who are best able to judge what is good and what is bad - if any - in the application of their scientific research.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

America has saved the world most of the time, but messed it up a couple of times.

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.

Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot undo the impact of technology. Nor would we want to.

I want to be mayor of the world. Don't give me too much money or too much power.

I do not see it as desirable for South Korea to take the back seat and watch discussions between the U.S. and China.

The American president isn't just the American president. He's going to be the leader of the whole Western world, you know? You got a pretty big responsibility.

Imagine if we had stopped science in 1904. Yes, there would have been no nerve gas and no Bhopal, but there would also have been no penicillin. All science is a trade-off.

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

Tony Blair is a decent man who genuinely thinks what he is doing is justified. But when he sees men such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld smirking and boasting as they announce their Shock and Awe offensive, we hope he understands why we believe we have been dragged into something we should have been fighting tooth and nail to stop.

Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.

My vision of a better world would be one under the control of a strong United Nations, one that truly has the support of all countries in the world. Only an effective world government could provide sufficient law and have the power to control the unboundaried destructive forces of pollution and war. I will continue to be a leader in the World Federalist Association.

The nations that offer to arbitrate are the ones that think they should rule the world.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.