"The work of real science is hard and often for long intervals frustrating...
"Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong. Most flashes of insight lead nowhere; statistically, they have a half-life of hours or maybe days.
"Most experiments to follow up the surviving insights are tedious and consume large amounts of time, only to yield negative or (worse!) ambiguous results.""
-Edward O. Wilson
"Scientists, Scholars, Knaves, and Fools,"
in American Scientist 86 (1998)
"None of the myriad scientific papers I'd read prepared me for the patience and diligence that go into scientific research. None had prepared me for the acute attention to minutiae that keeps science accurate, and scientific integrity intact.
"Or for the tedium."
-Vaughn Edelson
"Concentration Crisis" (2007)
"Tactics used by many practitioners of pseudoscience:
make a large number of vaguely scientific arguments in the hope of making the desired conclusion seem inevitable.
"It is essential to recognize that a disconnected assemblage of weak arguments does not create a single, strong scientific argument."
-John Timmer, Chris Lee, Jonathan M. Gitlin, and Matt Ford,
"Diluting the scientific method" (2007)