"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it." - Niels Bohr, 1927
"Nobody understands quantum theory." - Richard Feynman, 1967
"Civilization, as we know it today, owes its existence to the engineers. These are men, who, down the long centuries, have learned to exploit the properties of matter and the sources of power for the benefit of mankind. By an organized, rational effort to use the material world around them, engineers devised the myriad comforts and conveniences that mark the difference between our lives and those of our forefathers thousands of years ago." - L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers
"From ancient to modern times, every important invention has brought an outcry from those whose livelihood would be harmed by its adoption." - L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers
"I think of pure mathematicians as glorified janitors, men who tidy up the dusty conceptual corners via axiomatization after applied mathematicians have dug the foundations and built the house through laborious trial and error." - Godless Capitalist
"The only thing that genetic engineering does is to drastically increase the efficiency of the process of crop modification. We've been modifying crops deliberately since before the invention of writing, and we've been directly but crudely modifying their genetics for more than a hundred years. With genetic engineering we can directly analyze the genes of the plant and deliberately design changes; it's a profound improvement in capability, but mainly because it's a lot faster." - Steven Den Beste
"Physics without calculus is kind of like Art History for the blind" - Peter Deutsch, Williams '04
"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy." - Albert Einstein
"For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy." - Richard Feynman
"A mathematician can say anything, a physicist must remain partially sane." - J. Willard Gibbs, of "Gibbs Free Energy" fame
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship."- Robert Heinlein
"Physics is much too hard for physicists." - David Hilbert
"Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen" - David Hilbert
"I'm off flagellating myself with Boas... no, not the snakes... the book that we use for 'DiffEQ for Masochists'..." - Lowell Jacobson
"Physics 210, 'Mathematical Methods for Scientists,' is also known by its real name, 'Differential Equations for Masochists (or Physics Majors),' they're the same thing, really..." - Lowell Jacobson
"Indeed, some people claim that convolution has driven many electrical engineering undergraduates to contemplate theology either for salvation or as an alternative career." - B.P. Lathi, Signal Processing and Linear Systems
"Although thinking about demons has taught us much about entropy since Maxwell's time, the verdict seems to be that not even a demon can violate the second law of thermodynamics" - Schroeder, Thermal Physics
"Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture." - Bertrand Russell
"All Science is either physics or stamp collecting" - Ernest Rutherford
"Humans are to a large degree sensitive to energy fluxes rather than temperatures, which you can verify yourself on a cold, dark morning in the outhouse of a mountain cabin equipped with wooden and metal toilet seats. Both seats are at the same temperature, but your backside, which is not a very good thermometer, is nevertheless very effective at telling you which is which." - Craig F. Bohren and Bruce A. Albrecht, Atmospheric Thermodynamics, reprinted in Schroeder's Thermal Physics
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." - Mary Shafer, SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer, NASA Dryden
"What about this? Have you already observed that men who are by nature apt at calculation are naturally quick in virtually all studies..." - Socrates to Glaucon in Plato's Republic 526b
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." - C.P. Snow
"There's no crying in calculus" - Peter Thomson, math teacher, The Pingry School