Quotes / Science Is Bad

Anime & Manga

They seek new discoveries in pursuit of an emotional high and seek understanding for the sake of controlling others. There's no-one more motivated by self-satisfaction than scientists.

—Neon Genesis Evangelion

Film - Live-Action

Caught... in the wheels of progress.

—Coleman Francis, in the Fauxlosophic Narration to The Beast of Yucca Flats

He tampered in God's domain.

— Bride of the Monster

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

— Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Miles Dyson: How were we supposed to know?
Sarah Connor: Yeah, right. "How were you supposed to know?" Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you.
John: Mom...
Sarah: All you know how to create is death and destruction...
John: Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, okay?

— Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Music

Science... Has failed... Our world! Science... has failed our Mother Earth!

—System of a Down, Science.

Stand-up Comedy

There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks... to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don't give a shit what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you — your kid is not autistic. He's just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.

—Denis Leary, Why We Suck

Video Games

Science hurts!

— Science Vessel, Attacking, Starcraft II

Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.

— Sister Miriam Godwinson - "We Must Dissent", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God, and He awaits you just beyond the last theorem.

— Sister Miriam Godwinson - "We Must Dissent", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks, as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear — but, it was never the streets that were evil.

— Sister Miriam Godwinson - "The Blessed Struggle", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Webcomics

Me go too far! ... Me am play gods!

—Caveman Science Fiction

Web Original

This is bad experiment! We are bad people! Why did we usher forth the green apocalypse?!

Gordon Freeman during the Resonance Cascade, Freeman's Mind

Every time a famous type decides not to vaccinate their baby, the horns on Jenny McCarthy’s head grow half an inch more and her evil powers get stronger.

—Michael K.

10. Luddite Rule (or, George Lucas Rule)
Speaking of which, technology is inherently evil and is the exclusive province of the Bad Guys. They're the ones with the robots, factories, cyberpunk megalopolises and floating battle stations, while the Good Guys live in small villages in peaceful harmony with nature. (Although somehow your guns and/or heavily armed airships are exempted from this.)

—The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés

If I can't pronounce it, it must cause cancer.

—Rational Wiki on FoodBabe

“Real knowledge” is inerrant and occurs once so that they can learn it as children and never have to think again. Anything else can be dismissed. Which makes their figuring out enough about the internet to vomit their refuse on to it absolutely fascinating to study in its dissonance.

—Cerberus

Rather than our society heeding the wise counsel of scientific and technical experts, we now deride, distrust and defund them because they are perceived as threatening, know-it-all elites who offer opinions little better than that of the often misinformed common man.

—Jeffrey Cavanaugh

Although physicians have been trying to base their craft on science for hundreds of years, it’s really only been in the last century or so that they’ve succeeded. Yet still some would like to go back to the way it was. They yearn for the days when doctors were “healers” and shamans, the way medicine was for hundreds and hundreds of years before science intruded.

Unfortunately, one of those physicians happens to be "America’s doctor".

—Orac, "The Great and Powerful (Dr.) Oz"

The child who dies in agony because his parents believe dialysis is 'against God's will' is no less dead than a child burned at the altar of Molech. In fact, his death was infinitely more cruel and unnecessary (and often even more agonizing), since children were usually only sacrificed in pagan times during periods of grave social crisis, such as droughts or plagues. The ancients didn't know any better—people today have no excuse.

—Christopher Loring Knowles

Yes, that’s how you make a career in science. Stick to uniformity; don’t disagree. The reward is that you can later cruise past the poor struggling denialists at your local denialist think tank in your new Mercedes.

—The Encyclopedia of American Loons on climate change skeptic John Ray

Web Video

You're listening to Black Mesa radio: We play the hits while you play God.

—A Gag Dub of the Half-Life intro by Yahtzee

Western Animation

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DOOOOOONE?!

— Dr. Weird, after unleashing a giant robot rabbit, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins the movie by telling you how it ends. Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know. Important things.

—Ned Flanders, The Simpsons

SpongeBob: Aww, Patrick. Don't be so hard on yourself. It was the experiment's fault that you were such a jerk.
Patrick: I blame science! Stupid science!

— SpongeBob SquarePants, "The Fish Bowl"

Real Life

Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Personally, I think bliss is overrated.

— Collection of aesops

Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that’s far more childish than any myth.

—John Gray, philosopher

Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.

— Mark Twain

Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

— Ben Stein

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

—Michael Crichton

It's scientifically impossible for the bumblebee to fly; but the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, flies anyways.

—Mike Huckabee, 2008 U.S. Presidential nominee

Why pay attention to these scientists? And we're really regressing back to the medieval period. It's not a joke. If that's happening in the most powerful, richest country in the world, then this catastrophe isn't going to be averted. And everything else we're talking about won't matter in a generation or so.

—Noam Chomsky

"I like the Flat World versions [of The Silmarillion] best. The hope of Heaven is the only thing which makes modern astronomy tolerable: otherwise there must be an East and a West and Walls: aims and choices and not an endless circle of wandering."

—Katherine Farrer, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.

—William Jennings Bryan

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