Robert K. Merton Quotes

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past.

It is in the best interests of civilization and our economy and our nation to understand what objective truths are as revealed by the methods and tools of science.

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Science demands objective factual evidence - proof; spiritual experience is subjective and leads to faith.

Science built the Academy, superstition the Inquisition.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

I think that the issues we have with science these days are not restricted to what's happening with respect to religion. There are a lot of very religious scientists around.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition