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"When you use the word science it's often a tell, like in poker, that you're bluffing and that no science at all is going on. We have political science, we have social science. We don't have physical science or chemical science. There are just physics and chemistry." Peter Thiel   "If you think about what science is for and scientific communication is about, science works only when you are able to discuss the evidence in the open. I might be wrong, maybe you disagree with me, I don't know. The point is that I've given you my evidence, and you can say, 'Jay, you're right here, you're wrong here.' Then maybe I'll change my mind or maybe you'll change your mind. We'll have a discussion and it will result in some sort of resolution where we're both better informed as the consequences of the discussion. The censorship of science, essentially, effectively, is that you may as well not do science at all. Because you've ended the conversation that actually produces the conclusions that you'd have some confidence in with science." Jay Bhattacharya   "Science is a method, or more accurately, a collection of various methods, aimed at systematically investigating observable phenomena in the natural world. Rigorous science is characterized by hypothesis, experiment, testing, interpretation, and ongoing deliberation and debate. Put a group of real scientists in a room together and they will argue endlessly about the salience, significance, and interpretation of data, about the limitations and strengths of various research methodologies, and about the big picture questions. Science is an enormously complex human enterprise, with each scientific discipline having own refined methods of inquiry and its own competing theories. Science is not an irrefutable body of knowledge." Aaron Kheriaty   "No tutor would accept from a pupil the reasons given by Plato for the following quite important doctrines: that the Soul is tri-partite; that if the Soul is tri-partite, the ideal society would be a three-class state; that whatever exists, exists to perform one and only one function; that reason is one such function; that one and only one of the classes should be taught to reason; that membership of a class should normally be determined by pedigree; that empirical science can never be 'real' science; that there are Forms; that only knowledge of Forms is 'real science'; that only those who have this knowledge can have good political judgement; that political institutions must degenerate unless there are rulers who have had the sort of education that Plato describes; that 'justice' consists in doing one's own job; and so on." Gilbert Ryle   "Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilizing influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based." Eric Blair   "The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend." Edmund Burke   "The hallmark of science is that when there are competing ideas, we can agree on studies that will decide who is correct. Believing in things that cannot be falsified or tested is religion. Science is everything else." Vinay Prasad   "The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer's disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity. Private research support is following the same trajectory. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the world's largest philanthropic funders of basic science and arguably the most prestigious. Airline entrepreneur Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 to probe into the 'genesis of life itself.' Now diversity in medical research is at the top of HHMI's concerns. In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a 'happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist,' in the words of the institute's vice president. 'Experts' in diversity and inclusion will assess early-career academic scientists based on their plans for running 'happy and diverse' labs. Those applicants with the most persuasive 'happy lab' plans could receive one of the new Freeman Hrabowski scholarships. The scholarships would cover the recipient's university salary for ten years and would bring the equivalent of two or three NIH grants a year into his academic department. If an applicant's 'happy lab' plan fails to ignite enthusiasm in the diversity reviewers, however, his application will be shelved, no matter how promising his actual scientific research." Heather Mac Donald   "An aspiring science or engineering major who attends a school where her entering academic credentials put her in the middle or toward the top of her class is more likely to succeed than otherwise identical students attending a more elite school where those same credentials place her toward the bottom of the class. Put differently, an aspiring science or engineering major would be smart to attend a school where her entering credentials compare favorably with those of her classmates." Gail Heriot   "What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation. Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering—of trial by error." Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry   "All claims to scientific knowledge are at least potentially subject to additional tests. Why accept tentative knowledge when others offer absolute knowledge? Because it is only by accepting the tentativeness of scientific knowledge that we gain the promise science holds out to us: an ever-improving and ever-expanding understanding of the universe around us. Science asks us to strike this bargain: Give up the goal of absolute knowledge, accept the permanent tentativeness of all scientific propositions, and in exchange it will give you a steadily improving understanding of the way things work. This is not a perfect method, and it is as subject to failures and foibles as anything humans do, but it is the best way we have and probably the best we will ever have of learning about our universe." Lee Cronk   "If feminism is a critique of the objective standpoint as male, then we also disavow standard scientific norms as the adequacy criteria for our theory, because the objective standpoint we criticize is the posture of science. In other words, our critique of the objective standpoint as male is a critique of science as a specifically male approach to knowledge. With it, we reject male criteria for verification. We're not seeking truth in its female counterpart either, since that, too, is constructed by male power. We do not vaunt the subjective. We begin by seeking the truth of and in that which has constructed all this—that is, in gender." Catharine MacKinnon   "Progress in science proceeds in fits and starts. Some periods are filled with great breakthroughs; at other times researchers experience dry spells. Scientists put forward results, both theoretical and experimental. The results are debated by the community, sometimes they are discarded, sometimes they are modified, and sometimes they provide inspirational jumping-off points for new and more accurate ways of understanding the physical universe. In other words, science proceeds along a zig-zag path toward what we hope will be ultimate truth, a path that began with humanity's earliest attempts to fathom the cosmos and whose end we cannot predict." Brian Greene   "He had a deep contempt for politics and politicians. Politics, he maintained, was the curse of the modern age, as religion was of ages past. Just think of the sheer quantity of human misery caused by politics in this century—in Central Europe, Russia, China, Africa—he would urge rhetorically. Are you an anarchist, then, she asked. But of course he wasn't. He seemed to have a rather old-fashioned Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of society through the application of science. He made a stark opposition between the pursuit of knowledge, which was science, and the pursuit of power, which was politics. All forms of pseudo-knowledge, from divinity to deconstruction, he maintained, had to impose their false world pictures on others by becoming political." David Lodge   "In Erasmus, in Rabelais, in the Utopia one recognizes the very accent of the angry belle-lettrist railing, as he rails in all ages, at 'jargon' and 'straw-splitting.' On this side Pope and Swift are true inheritors of the Humanist tradition. It is easy, of course, to say that Laputa is an attack not on science but on the aberrations of science. I am not convinced. The learning of the Brobdingnagians and the Horses is ruthlessly limited. Nothing that cannot plead the clearest immediate utility—nothing that cannot make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—wins any approval from Swift. Bentley is not forgiven for knowing more Greek than Temple, nor Theobald for knowing more English than Pope. Most of the history of Europe is a mere wilderness, not worth visiting, in which 'the monks finished what the Goths begun.' The terror expressed at the end of the Dunciad is not wholly terror at the approach of ignorance: it is also terror lest the compact little fortress of Humanism should be destroyed, and new knowledge is one of the enemies. Whatever is not immediately intelligible to a man versed in the Latin and French classics appears to them to be charlatanism or barbarity. The number of things they do not want to hear about is enormous." Clive Staples Lewis   "In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in.' It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants' 'science'—they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled." Clive Staples Lewis   "Again and again, once you examine the history of innovation, you find scientific breakthroughs as the effect, not the cause, of technological change. It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration. The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The flowering of chemistry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by the needs of dye-makers. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." Matt Ridley   "In 17th-century Europe the disciplines freest from religious politics were what we now call, collectively, science—what the educated of the time called natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was thought to be a politically neutral field of study, not the concern of governments and religious establishments. The case of Galileo shocked the Europe of his day in part because contemporaries (including Galileo himself) believed natural philosophy should dwell in an empyrean realm beyond the reach of politico-religious authority. In the 21st century, sadly, science has become almost as much a part of politics as regime theory or international relations. Scientific research no longer provides a refuge from politics; it plays too important a role in the legitimation of policy." James Hankins   "Evolution has made knowledge possible. Not necessarily reliable knowledge, but knowledge good enough, on average, to confer a benefit. Evolution has developed sociality to the point where members of many species can transfer knowledge across time: culture, in other words. As comparative and developmental psychology have shown, evolution has developed the human brain's capacity to understand false belief—to understand that others, or we ourselves, might be mistaken about a situation—and hence has driven our quest for better knowledge. Both human culture and our human awareness of the possibility of being mistaken have eventually given rise to science, to the systematic challenging of our own ideas. The methods of science make relatively rapid change and improvement possible—as well, of course, as unforeseen new problems. They offer no guarantee of the validity of individual ideas we propose, but they do offer the prospect of our collectively learning from one another." Brian Boyd   "Almost without exception, any common-sense view of the world is scientifically false. Obvious examples are the movement of the sun with respect to the earth, and the fact that a force on a body does not cause movement, but acceleration. How unnatural it is to believe, rightly, that at a constant 400 miles per hour on a plane, there is no force acting on you to move you ahead. And how well does Darwin's theory of evolution by random variation and natural selection fit with common sense? Even the number of molecules in a glass of water is beyond anyone's natural expectation: there are more than there are glasses of water in the oceans. No matter where one looks in science, its ideas confound common sense. It is not even easy to think of how ice cools one's drink in the correct way: cold does not flow from the ice to the liquid, it is the heat flowing from the liquid that melts the ice." Lewis Wolpert