“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams (1770)

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” — Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson (1809)

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.” – Galileo

“Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe.” Albert Einstein, to Max Born (1926)

“Holmes: I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1891 A Scandal in Bohemia, [H/t James Randi]

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”— Richard Feynman, Theoretical physicist, co-recipient Nobel Prize in Physics.

“It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is quite another to do so when the environmental problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations. This is definitely the case with global warming.” – Frederick Seitz, Introduction to Fred Singer’s Hot Talk, Cold Science (1999)

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.” – Max Planck