Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

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

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.

Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom.

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Scientific advancement should aim to affirm and to improve human life.

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.

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.

As a species, we can at times be dimwitted and cruel. But we're also capable of learning.

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he - she - is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science.

The strength of a nation is its knowledge.

All these remarkable new technologies are starting to make people very uncomfortable with the whole process of science.

… countries that are behind in their industrial and scientific development are tempted at times to steal those technologies from other countries.

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

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

Two conditions render difficult this historic situation of mankind: It is full of tremendously deadly armament, and it has not progressed morally as much as it has scientifically and technically.

Science can give mankind a better standard of living, better health and a better mental life, if mankind in turn gives science the sympathy and support so essential to its progress.

Man has become a superman ... because he not only disposes oinnate, physical forces, but because he is in command ... olatent forces in nature and because he can put them to his service.... But the essential fact we must surely all feel in our hearts ... is that we are becoming inhuman in proportion as we become supermen.

We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.

Man is an animal with primary instincts of survival. Consequently his ingenuity has developed first and his soul afterwards. The progress of science is far ahead of man's ethical behavior.