Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Certainty ends inquiry.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

One must do no violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimera.

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.

Do not fear lest you should meditate too much upon Him and speak of Him in an unworthy way, providing you are led by faith. Do not fear lest you should entertain false opinions of Him so long as they are in conformity with the notion of the infinitely perfect Being.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of "crackpot" than the stigma of conformity.

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

There is a very well-defined procedure that allows the Vatican to raise issues with a particular theologian about something that does not appear in conformity with the Catholic faith. It is not always easy to make this determination.

The real end of prayer is not so much to get this or that single desire granted, as to put human life into full and joyful conformity with the will of God.

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

The hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions, never do, and never can, teach any thing but what is in conformity with the opinions of those who pay them.

Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.

I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.