"I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again."
— Alexander Shulgin (Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story)

"Enough research will tend to support your conclusions."
— Arthur Bloch

"What we find changes who we become."
— Peter Morville

"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time."
— Francis Parkman

"Each of our devoted investigators has had to protest the critical importance to science and the surpassing conveniences offered by the cabin: How well the hill-and-dale floor is held together by layered patches of variegated linoleum; how nicely the roof admits starlight and yet keeps out much of the rain; how smoothly the door opens when you lift firmly on the knob; how ideally the two one-room accessory structures serve as “slave” quarters for summer assistants. And what would befall the local ward of dependent woodmice if the cabin commissary were to fail?"
— Durward L. Allen (Wolves of Minong: Isle Royal's Wild Community)

"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."
— Marston Bates

"Verwirf nichts, ehe du es untersucht hast; erst prüfe – dann magst du es bestreiten."
— Ben Sira

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss

"Contrary to what Asimov says, the most exciting phrase in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' or 'That's funny.,' it's 'Your research grant has been approved.'."
— John Alejandro King

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
— Niels Bohr

"The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile."
— Hans Selye

"An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing."
— Nicholas Butler

"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
— Thomas Huxley

"The problem in this business isn’t to
keep people from stealing your ideas;
it's making them steal your ideas!"
— Howard Aiken

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. "
— Steven Weinberg

"You cannot teach a person something he does not already know; you can only bring what he does know to his awareness."
— Galileo

"I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from."
— Lawrence Wright

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"
— Roman Payne (Cities & Countries)