Galileo Quotes

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.”
― Ken Robinson

“If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is now known by every intelligent man, the book never could have been written. It was produced by ignorance, and has been believed and defended by its author. It has lost power in the proportion that man has gained knowledge. A few years ago, this book was appealed to in the settlement of all scientific questions; but now, even the clergy confess that in such matters, it has ceased to speak with the voice of authority. For the establishment of facts, the word of man is now considered far better than the word of God. In the world of science, Jehovah was superseded by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. All that God told Moses, admitting the entire account to be true, is dust and ashes compared to the discoveries of Descartes, Laplace, and Humboldt. In matters of fact, the bible has ceased to be regarded as a standard. Science has succeeded in breaking the chains of theology. A few years ago, Science endeavored to show that it was not inconsistent with the bible. The tables have been turned, and now, Religion is endeavoring to prove that the bible is not inconsistent with Science. The standard has been changed.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“. . . we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. . . . We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“We're better than Galileo. Because he's dead.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“There is not a single effect in Nature, not even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can ever arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is attained, would recognise that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.”
― Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican

“A foot note in Scale, Geoffery West:

The full quotation from Einstein is worth repeating because it emphasizes a central dictum of science:
"Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed this into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics, indeed of modern science altogether."

Taken from Einstein's "On the Methods of Theoretical Physics," Essays on modern Science (New York:Dover, 2009) 12-21”
― Einstein Albert 1879-1955

“Galileo, yet men turn around women!”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Ever since the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had first reached him in California, Brecht had connected Galileo's caving-in before the Inquisition as the great and perhaps ineradicable moral blot on the history of physics and the developments in modern physics that led to the atomic and hydrogen bombs.”
― John Fuegi , Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, according to Plan

“If the world is turning, even the church can’t stop it; if it isn’t turning, nobody can go out and make it turn.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan, Galileo Galilei

“Galileo was challenged because he declared a theory to be a fact and argued with the Church about the genuine meaning of the Bible.”
― Michael Coren, Why Catholics are Right

“Contemporaries only know the authority figures and the loudmouths. And the people born into power. But it takes perspective to know who's carrying the load. Nobody here has a clue who Johannes Kepler is. All they know about Galileo is that he's a teacher who got in trouble with the Inquisition. I doubt anyone's heard of Francis Bacon. Even in Britain, nobody really knows him. He's just a guy with a funny name.”
― Jack McDevitt, Time Travelers Never Die

“Santi was a behemoth in the art world, and being known solely by one's first name was a level of fame achieved only by an elite few... people like Napoleon, Galileo, and Jesus... and, of course, the demigods Langdon now heard blaring from Harvard dormitories - Sting, Madonna, Jewel, and the artist formerly known as Prince, who had changed his name to the symbol ?, causing Langdon to dub him 'The Tau Cross With Intersecting Hermaphroditic Ankh.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth. In 1610, Galileo observed sunspots on its surface, proving that the Sun was rotating and at different speeds. It also proved that you never know who's watching you.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.

[Scene fourteen. Translation by Desmond Vesey, 1960. ‘The present version is a translation of the complete text of the latest German edition, not a stage adaptation.’]”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“The mechanism of the heavens was clearer, the mechanism of their courts was still murky.

[Scene fourteen. English version by Charles Laughton.]”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“The Christian doctrine of creation is the origin of modern science.”
― M. B. Foster

“Istoria ştiinţei este ca o ştafetă. Copernic a preluat steagul de la Aristarh, de la Cicero, de la Plutarh; şi Galileo a preluar steagul de la Copernicus.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“One question was, who gets to speak? Who has the authority to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality? This was what your Church objected to - that you asserted that you had the right to make statements about fundamental things. This was what you were saying, under all your details, which as often as not were wrong, or at least unsupported - that you had a right to your own opinion about reality, and that you had the right to say it in public, and argue for it against the views of theocrats.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“God makes the world using mathematics, and He has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand. It's prayer. It's more than prayer, it's a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension - an epiphany - it's seeing God, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that. Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper into God's manner of thinking about these things?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“The good that [Galileo] fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“La falsità del sistema Copernicano non deve essere in conto alcuno messa in dubbio, e massime da noi Cattolici, havendo la inregragabile autorità delle Scritture Sacre, interpretate da I maestri sommi in teologia, il concorde assenso de’ quali ci rende certi della stabilità della terra, posta nel centro, e della mobilità del sole intorno ad essa. Le congetture poi per le quali il Copernico et altri suoi seguaci hanno profferito il contrario si levono tutte con quell saldissimo argumento preso dalla onnipotenza di Iddio, la quale potendo fare in diversi, anzi in infiniti, modi quallo che alla nostra oppinione e osservazione par fatto in un tal particolare, non doviamo volere abbreviare la mano di Dio, e tenacemente sostenere quello in che possiamo essere ingannati.…D’Arcetri, li 29 Marzo 1641.

(Le Opere Di Galileo Galilei, Vol. XVIII, Firenze, G. Barbèra – Editore, 1968, p. 316)

The falsity of the Copernican system should not in any way be called into question, above all, not by Catholics, since we have the unshakeable authority of the Sacred Scripture, interpreted by the most erudite theologians, whose consensus gives us certainty regarding the stability of the Earth, situated in the center, and motion of the sun around the Earth. The conjectures employed by Copernicus and his followers in maintaining the contrary thesis are all sufficiently rebutted by that most solid argument deriving from the omnipotence of God. He is able to bring about in different ways, indeed, in an infinite number of ways, things that, according to our opinion and observation, appear to happen in one particular way. We should not seek to shorten the hand of God and boldly insist on something beyond the limits of our competence... D'Arcetri, March 29, 1641.”
― Galileo Galilei, Le opere di Galileo Galilei 1897 [Hardcover]

“Questions and debates related to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, starting with Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and culminating with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, although we can go back to Democritus and his conventions, arise not only from these qualities per se but also from the lack of clear and precise definitions of these terms, including the terms “sensibles” (“sensible qualities”) and “proper and common sensibles.” For the philosophers of old, since Aristotle, proper sensibles were the same as secondary qualities for the philosophers since Locke. Common sensibles would be primary qualities based on Locke’s classification. The main distinction shall be sought between the essence of the Being as a singularity, in its ultimate mode, and its manifestation, appearance, in and through plurality. We can further postulate that there is a distinction between the essence of singularity and its appearance or manifestation in (through) plurality.

The next question is whether Plurality saves the essence of singularity. Although singularity is saved even in plurality, this essence hides beyond appearance, and the senses cannot experience it. The senses experience only the appearance of plurality, not its essence as a singularity.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE