“It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to everyone.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of this world, all things are weighed by the false scale of custom”
— Lord Byron
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history”
— Aldous Huxley
“I shall speak and converse with you on the following condition: viz., that unless you are compelled by reason, you will reject as unimportant everything you will hear from me.”
— Nicholas of Cusa
“It is easier to make measurements than to know what we are measuring.”
— Bradford S. Weeks
“The roots of ecology are in the ecology of roots.”
— D. N. Sen
“Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.”
— P.B. Medawar
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
“Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
“Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.”
— Robert Hass
“Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a week.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness.”
— Albert Einstein
“Of all the worst ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.”
— Anatole France
“Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views, the dialogue between different points of view, the choice between different judgements. The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.”
“Alfred P. Sloane is reported to have said at a meeting of one of his top committees: ‘Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.’ Everyone around the table nodded in assent. ‘Then,’ continued Mr. Sloane, ‘I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.’”
— Peter F. Drucker
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
— George Orwell
“If you are old and you wish to be young again, if only for a moment, try and identify a dragonfly.”
— Simon Barnes
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour.”
— George Santayana
“There is a light at the end of every tunnel. Some tunnels just happen to be longer than others.”
— Ada Adams
“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
— Samuel Beckett
“The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.”
— H.G. Wells
“If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.”
— John A. Wheeler
“Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
— Thomas Huxley
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.”
— Thomas Huxley
“Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.”
— Peter Medawar
“Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.”
— Steven Weinberg
“We accomplish the apparently miraculous feat of reducing a chaotic world to order, because we carefully confine our attention and our efforts only to those portions which we find can be ordered.”
— Norman Campbell
“…an academic discipline (is) a group of scholars who (have) agreed to not ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions.”
— Mark Nathan Cohen
“Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.”
— George Bataille
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
— William Blake
“In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary.”
— Maimonides
“More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
— Woody Allen
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
— H.G. Wells
“Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.”
— Blaise Pascal
“I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.”
— William Penn
“Molecule, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter.”
— Ambrose Bierce
“This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
— Bertrand Russell
“The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”
— John Keats
“With knowledge comes more doubt.”
— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
“When you have exhausted all the possibilities, remember this, you haven’t.”
— Thomas Edison
“…there’s no reason why scholarship can’t be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.”
— Jonathon Keats
“Nowhere did he reveal his originality so forcefully as in the ideas he borrowed.”
— Delacroix
“You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.”
— John Nuveen
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
— Iris Murdoch
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts.”
— Henry Rosovsky
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
— Gloria Steinem
“A good scientist is less mindful of the risk of making a wrong prediction than of the stupidity of refraining from prediction.”
— Antoni Milewski
“Science seeks complexity in description but simplicity in explanation.”
— Antoni Milewski
“What a cancer cell would say to a normal cell, without irony, is ‘It’s the Economy, stupid’.”
— Antoni Milewski
“In order to explore Biology to the limits of the scientific method, be skeptical about everything – beginning with skepticism.”
— Antoni Milewski
“Wisdom and technology are neither each other’s cause, nor each other’s consequence.”
— Antoni Milewski
“A scientist can never clarify any puzzle too much, or test any clarification too soon.”
— Antoni Milewski