Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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.

I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.

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.

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 biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.

Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

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.

Science began as one of the noblest expressions of man's reason. It will continue to serve humanity so long as it never forgets that human beings remain the heart of its purpose.

We should be living a life of purity.

I just want people to hold themselves to account about what they think more, because I strongly believe that the way to live a moral life is to not allow yourself to have beliefs which are easy but which don't make sense.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

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

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

Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.

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

Science and education, when devoid of a social conscience or environmental and human concern, are meaningless.

Lawyers are like priests; people come to them and disburden themselves of their troubles, and get consolation, if they pay well for it; but there is one point in which they don't treat them like priests; they don't confess all their sins; they suppress them, and often get themselves and their counsel into a scrape by it, that's a fact.

Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.

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

...the life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for.

The object . . . is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion.

Little sins carry with them but little temptations to sin, and then a man shews most viciousness and unkindness, when he sins on a little temptation. It is devilish to sin without a temptation; it is little less than devilish to sin on a little occasion. The less the temptation is to sin, the greater is that sin.