The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

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.

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.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.