Francois Rabelais Quotes

Science without conscience is the death of the soul.

I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe.

Non-cooperation in military matters should be an essential moral principle for all true scientists.

Science sans conscience n' est que le ruine de l'âme. Knowledge without conscience is but the ruine of the soule.

You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.

Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

Science without respect for human life is degrading to us all and reflects a hollow and deceptive philosophy, a philosophy that we as a people should never condone.

If you know something is morally reprehensible, then it is your moral obligation to stop it as soon as possible.

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good. That is impossible. Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Here rests the soul of our nation - here also should be our conscience.

Conscience? Great souls do not worry themselves with such little details

I have learned that a clear conscience, or a legal opinion, does not make you ethically bullet proof.

I just felt sick. I was actually executing people. I knew it was wrong, and I should have voted against it. But I didn’t.

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues.

You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.

Should I be the one to play God? We're both about the same age, but we grew up in different neighborhoods.

I have faith, as I did when I announced my stem-cell decision in 2001, that science and ethics can coexist.

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

Control cannot be called conscience until we are able to take it inside us and make it our own, until--in spite of the fact that the wrongs we have done or imagined will never be punished or known--we nonetheless feel that the clutch in the stomach, that chill upon the soul, that self-inflicted misery called guilt.

There's less of a connection for a lot of people between the technical decisions we make and the ethical ramifications we are responsible for.

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

Conscience is its own readiest accuser.

We cannot avert our eyes without staining our souls.