Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts, but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

The really important thing is learning how to sceptically question and rely on empirical evidence.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Science is not wisdom.

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.

Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.

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.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.

A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!

Science is the only true guide in life.