Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

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.

Biological science is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good or bad. It’s like a knife blade with three edges: The edge that cuts, the dull edge that does not cut well and the edge that cuts what you do not want it to.

Dual use research of concern (DURC) is research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, products, or technologies that could be directly misapplied by others to pose a threat to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or materiel

Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

You should know how terrible a power belief is, especially in the wrong hands -- and how do you tell which hands are wrong? Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you've changed, by believing. Once you've changed, other things start to follow.

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.

Just because scientists have the knowledge to do it, the technology to do it, and some may even have a financial motive or other incentive to do it, does not make it right.

Science is not inherently good.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

I say this as an engineer: We are profoundly bad at asking ourselves how the things we build could be misused.

Do you trust in your fellow citizens, in a sense that whatever they will have in additional tools they will use in balance more to the good or more to the bad? If you think they will use it more to the bad, you shouldn't do science, you know.

Whenever technological advancement is made it can always be used both for good or for bad.

I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind.

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.

When men are engaged in war and conquest, the tools of science become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three. We must not condemn man because his inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature are being exploited for false and destructive purposes. Rather, we should remember that the fate of mankind hinges entirely upon man’s moral development.

[The blame for the future 'plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.

Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.