Famous Quotes

"We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors."

Lewis Thomas on Science

More quotes about Science

• "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

  Albert Einstein on Science

• "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."

  Martin Luther King, Jr. on Science

• "Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control."

  Martin Luther King, Jr. on Science

• "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right a single experiment can prove me wrong."

  Albert Einstein on Science

• "Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss."

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Science

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

• "A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart."

• "A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway."

• "I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way."

• "Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow."

• "There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain."