I, Galileo, son of the late Vicenzo Galilei, swear that I never said that the prime numbers are useless. What I said was that you cannot count lunar craters by counting 2, 3, 5, 7.

Measure what can be measured, and make measureable what cannot be measured.

In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?

E pur si muove. "Albeit It does move". (That's what Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)

The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them. What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold "precious," and earth and soil "base"?