Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Science is the key to our future, and if you don't believe in science, then you're holding everybody back.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

Science is the future of mankind.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Evolution doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, no more than gravity does. I want to rekindle excitement over what we've achieved as a species with the space program. We can't afford to regress back to the days of superstition.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

One can not impede scientific progress.

There are many men now living who were in the habit of using the age-old expression: 'It is as impossible as flying.' The discoveries in physical science, the triumphs in invention, attest the value of the process of trial and error. In large measure, these advances have been due to experimentation.

A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization. But our nation with its true qualities deserves to become and will become civilized and progressive.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.

The emergence of modern science as a major new frontier of advancement that would lead, on one hand, to the discovery of new secrets of the universe, the invention of means to harness those secrets and the powers they represented, and the means to improve human health and allow humans to survive to both undertake that work and to enjoy its fruits.

The advancement of the arts (technology) from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

Scientific theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand in hand.

The ... progress of improvement and discovery ought not to be overlooked. ... Philosophy already directs her finger at sources of inexhaustible power. ... We are on the eve of mechanical discoveries still greater than any which have yet appeared.

With 5% of the world’s population, the United States employs about a third of all the research and development workers in the world.

Who brings tomorrow into the present if not the scientists, technicians and engineers?

When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.

There are those who say that such research should be stopped by law, alleging that man’s destructive powers are already large enough. So no doubt that the more elderly and ape-like of our prehistoric ancestors objected to the innovation of cooked food and pointed out the grave danger of the use of the newly discovered agency, fire.