Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.

Science is magic that works.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

Science is nothing but perception.

I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe. I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

Science has revealed that the human body is made up of millions and millions of atoms… For example, I am made up of 5.8×10 27 atoms.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

And yet it moves.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Music is not math. It’s science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, ‚You know, there’s no sound in outer space.‘

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

My first popular book, ‚A Brief History of Time,‘ aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.

From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work – not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.