How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
We can give our brothers a new light, cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known. The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask. (5.6)
Equality 7-2521's just created a working electric light. Now he's starting to talk about all the technological possibilities that science can unlock. Science can enable human beings to control the great powers of nature and do what they please with them. Has he just realized this, or was the desire for such power guiding his experiments all along? Is it in tension with his earlier statement that "We must know that we may know"?
Quote #8
"What is not thought by all men cannot be true," said Collective 0-0009. (7.35)
Collective 0-0009 sums up his society's attitude towards science here. Only what society says is true, and society can only say what everybody thinks. Doesn't allow much room for individual experimentation, does it? In fact, it's hard to imagine how it even allows for any discoveries. How can a society that believes this ever learn anything? It's a miracle they got as far as the candle…
Quote #9
Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past," said Solidarity 8-1164, "but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must." (7.39)
Whenever individual scientists had innovative or creative ideas in the past, says another member of the Council of Scholars, they were forced to abandon them (presumably because not everybody else shared them). Doesn't sound like science at all.