"The history of scientific knowledge consists of a perennial rigging and collapsing of ever expanding paradigms - every expansion denied and fought off with the last-ditch obstinacy of old guard scientists."- Lew Paz

Diseases have natural origins.

Hippocrates, Greek physician

Mechanical methods can suggest the truth of mathematical propositions, which then may be rigorously proven by mathematical methods.

Archimedes, Sicilian mathematician

The distance and size of the celestial bodies can be found by determining the size of their eccentric and epicyclic circles relative to the Earth's radius.

The spherical Earth can be projected onto a plane map using geometrical techniques; localities can be plotted on a standard grid of latitude and longitude lines.

Problems in plane and spherical trigonometry can be solved with the help of a table of the chords subtending the arcs from 0° to 90°.

The data derived from experiments can be represented by mathematical equations and can be presented in tabular form.

Ptolemy, Eygptian astronomer

Motion is relative.

The Earth is not at the center of the universe.

The sun, the planets, and the stars do not revolve around the Earth; rather; the Earth is one of the planets, and it revolves around the sun, as do the other planets.

The apparent "loops" that the planets make in their motions across the heavens are not real motions; they are mere appearances, caused by our position on the Earth and the Earth's motion around the sun relative to the other planets.

The appearance of the heavens' rotation about the Earth is due to the fact that we are on the Earth's surface and the Earth is rotating about its axis once every twenty four hours.

Nicholas Copernicus, Polish astronomer

Skeptical inquiry makes for good human life.

Appearances vary according to the condition of the
observer and the nature of what is to be judged.

Sextus Empiricus, Greek physician and philosopher

There is no fixed human nature that remains identical
regardless of time, place, and circumstance; human nature develops in accordance with self-knowledge
and with insight into the essences of things.

Human history is knowable because human beings have made it, just as nature is known to God because God has made it.

Historically, society evolves in cycles from one governed by imagination, superstition, and custom to one governed by rational understanding and that,
in turn, declines into a society governed by imagination.

Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher, historian, and jurist

There is limited certainty in
all branches of human knowledge.

Probability theory can be
applied to natural and social sciences.

There can be continuous progress
and improvement in human affairs.

Mathematics can be applied to the
social sciences and to human problems.

Human suffering can be
ameliorated through social scientific study.

There are rational and scientific
reasons why slavery should be abolished.

There is a reasonable basis for
decision making in human affairs.

Marie-Jean Antoine Nicholas de Caritat, French mathematician

The goal of science is the pursuit of truth.

The logic that holds together mathematics pervades the universe; we understand the universe by understanding it's underlying mathematical theories.

Carl Freidrich Gauss, German mathematician and scientist

Analogies are a valid
and important tool in physical theory.

Fundamental forces have a reality
of their own spreading through all space.

Light consists of transverse electromagnetic waves.

Our knowledge is of relations between objects
rather than of the objects in and of themselves.

James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish mathematical physicist

In our disenchanted world, violence has become the decisive means for politics.

Society must be understood objectively, a procedure that entails refusing to jump to evaluative conclusions.

An important contribution of the social scientist is to alert us to inconvenient facts and the unintended consequences of human action.

Humankind may be constructing its own iron cage:
Ironically and tragically, our own presumed success and progress may trap us.

Max Weber, Maximilian Weber, German political economist and sociologist

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely;
now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more.
Now people want to think only what they are
supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

Oswald Spengler, German mathmatician

Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution.

W. Lance Bennett, political scientist

See psychological operations

What are the moral convictions most fondly held by
barbarous and semi-barbarous peoples?

They are the convictions that authority
is the soundest basis of belief;
that merit attaches to readiness to believe;
that the doubting disposition is a bad one,
and skepticism is a sin.

Thomas Henry Huxley, British biologist

The breakdown of social structures occurs when creative individuals fail to lead through the excercise of creative power.

Arnold Toynbee, English economic historian

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.

Jacob Bronowski, English-Polish mathematician

I believe in an immortal soul.

Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness.

Life and soul, therefore,

cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun, German rocket scientist

Iron rusts from disuse;

stagnant water loses it purity

and in cold weather becomes frozen;

even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

It is hard to have patience with people who say

'There is no death' or 'death doesn't matter.'

There is death.

And whatever is matters.

And whatever happens has consequences,

and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.

You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian scientist and artist

None are more hopelessly enslaved than
those who falsely believe they are free.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, German scientist, philosopher and author

There is a lurking fear that some things are not meant “to be known,” that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make.

Carl Sagan, American astronomer and astrobiologist

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Thanks to television, for the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient

"Science teaches us to look more closely, to see more clearly. We decide that a theory is valid only when it is proved by experimentation and that experimentation can be replicated, and if it cannot be, we learn from this too and say: Here are the limits of what is possible now. Science is valid because it cannot be taken on faith alone.

In a complicated reality, the public must trust experts,
because how can you know what to do if you cannot know what is real?

Tell the truth, always, we teach students, withhold nothing from your data.

It is a categorical imperative for science and indeed for all societies.

To 'tell the truth always' comes from Immanuel Kant."

-Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical humanities and bioethics
at Northwestern University's Feinberg School

In August of 1962, Mariner 2 was launched for a quick rendezvous with nearby Venus, zipping by at a distance of 22,000 miles, scanning its radiation field and proving that a terminal case of global warming had completely ruined its surface for our kind of life.

That fly-by ushered in nearly half a century of interplanetary visitations of historic evolutionary significance. About 4.6 billion years after Earth and a handful of planet siblings were assembled by random collisions of rock, metal and ice, our planet began flinging small bits of itself back out into the darkness, trying to satisfy a newly evolved curiosity with fragile machines equipped with cameras and radio transmitters.

It took so long because first there had to be a species with the audacity to think that it could build such contraptions, calculate their trajectories and make them fly.

We did it.

There is no more solid, visceral confirmation of the truths embodied by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

If our ideas about other planets are merely a "text" to be deconstructed, or another creation story to debate, if they are culturally determined, internally constructed, dreamed, projected or imagined, then why are the planets there, right there, where we thought they would be?

David Greenspoon, curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science