The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.

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.

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.

We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.

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

Certainty ends inquiry.