Lancelot Hogben Quotes

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

We pray that every field of science may contribute in bringing happiness - not disaster - to human beings.

If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world.

Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

If you want to do bad things, science is the most powerful way to do them.

Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

We can't allow science to undo its own good work.

The concept there was that the small number of developed countries within the Commonwealth should provide assistance. This was not just financial but personal, providing experts and so on, to assist less developed members of the Commonwealth to get on the growing path. And that was part of what we did with South Africa.

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity.

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

You like science? You enjoy science? Always use it for good, never for evil. Can you promise me that?

Education is like a diamond with many facets: It includes the basic mastery of numbers and letters that give us access to the treasury of human knowledge, accumulated and refined through the ages; it includes technical and vocational training as well as instruction in science, higher mathematics, and humane letters.

I don't like to rate myself; others can do that. I've spoken with a number of young people who weren't even born in 1969, when the first moon landing was made. They've witnessed the first person to fly at faster than speed of the sound without propulsion. These kids are happy to have had such a momentous event in their lifetime.

Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves.

The '80s was wild compared to my real small childhood, which was late '70s.

The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

There are millions of young children being educated to a very narrow-minded view of religion. And it's out of that education of large numbers of young people that you then get this extremism.

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

The architect holds much knowledge, but is not a specialist. Especially with the computer and technology, the amount of knowledge an architect possesses keeps on growing.

Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch, and being killed with an automatic pistol or shell in place of a dagger or a battle-axe.