Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

Most scientific revelations happened after the pursuit of knowledge quit being secret and hermetic.

There is nothing inherently wrong about science.

Indeed, scientific truth by consensus has had a uniformly bad history.

The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.

You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.

I love science, and I believe in it. I have a faith that science can solve problems and make the world a better place.

If you go back to the 17th century, scientists generally weren't rewarded much at all for sharing discoveries, and as a result, they conducted a lot of their research very, very secretively indeed.

Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind. Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

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.

Every science has been an outcast.

The great tragedy of Science --- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact