Samuel Johnson

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

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Albert Einstein

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

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I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

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Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

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Samuel Johnson

Words are but the signs of ideas.

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Toni Morrison

Tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

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1. One

I am trying to find my poetic rhythm.
Pen my flow of thoughts.
Words running through my mind,
Ideas running through my mind.
Incoherent, Scattered and disjointed

I am trying to make words and ideas one
Create a world of words, in this world of chaos
Words running from one end
Ideas running from one end
On a path of collision

Ideas and words unite, one
One, the beginning
One, the universal beginning
One, the number of the gods
One, my first poem

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Signs

Words and music by neil diamond
Signs that burn like shooting stars
That pass across the nighttime skies,
They reach out in their mystic language
For us to read between the lines.
Some are born who would defy them,
Others still who would deny them, signs.
Signs like moments hung suspended,
Echoes just beneath the heart
Speak in voices half remembered
And half forgotten play their part.
Signs that come as we lay sleeping
Left behind for our keeping, signs.
Sail along, sail along the reefs and the coves inside your soul.
Sail along, sail along in search of a star that you can hold.
And we journey far to where that star may lead to (lead to).
Signs that whisper in the dreams of sailors
And of river queens of paupers and of men with means,
It all depends on how it reads.
Some are born who never need them,
Others still who never read them, signs.
Sail along, sail along the reefs and the coves inside your soul.
Sail along, sail along in search of a star that you can hold.
And we journey far to where that star may lead to (lead to).
Signs, signs.
Some are born who never need them,
Others still who never read them, signs.

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John Locke

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

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In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

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One of my complaints is that you've got far more scientists than ever before but the pace of discovery has not increased. Why? Because they're all busy just filling in the details of what they think is the standard story. And the youngsters, the people with different ideas have just as big a fight as ever and normally it takes decades for science to correct itself. But science does correct itself and that's the reason why science is such a glorious thing for our species.

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The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.

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Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

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Ours is the age of substitutes instead of language, we have jargon instead of principles, slogans and instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

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People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

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Carl Sagan

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.

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Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

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Carl Sagan

There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

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Rumi

Out Beyond Ideas

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense

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But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

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I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

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