"The most important thing about science is the scientific method - a way of thinking systematically, a way of assembling evidence and appraising it, a way of conducting experiments so as to predict accurately what will happen under given circumstances, a way of ascertaining and recognizing one's own errors, a way of finding fallacies in long-held ideas. Science itself is constantly changing, largely as the result of the scientific method."

Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness

"It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false... When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this [referring to the Holocaust] is how they behave."

"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known... Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error... Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible."

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

"To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated."

"Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future."

James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Isaac Newton (quoted in E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics)