c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer. But the spirit of the whole is processional. The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is dogmatic science. But they'll march! The little harlots will caper and the freaks will distract the attention and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the solidity of things which pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on coming, the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten, nor jeer, nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
— Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
This belief, that science eradicates (the need for) God, is a myth many people believe today. The truth is that science, the study of the world and collection of our findings, has not and cannot disprove God. There is no scientific journal that has disproven God’s existence. This is because God cannot be put in a test tube and either verified or falsified. God is a spiritual being and is outside the reach of empirical scientific research. Christians cannot prove God the existence of God with absolute certainty, nor can atheists disprove his existence with any certainty. That does not mean that we cannot look at the evidence as to whether or not God exists.
— Jon Morrison, Clear Minds & Dirty Feet: A Reason to Hope, a Message to Share
There's no science that can't be used for good or for evil. Science could be used by whoever has the power to use it and desire to use it. If you make people knowledgeable about these sciences and don't point out this fact, then you're saying, I withdraw from the battle, from the discussion of the ethics involved. I just stick to the facts. And that of course means that you've surrendered to the strongest forces. You say you're neutral in what you do, you aren't that concerned with it. If the Pentagon is using your discoveries, that's not your problem. It's unavoidable that you have some responsibility, it seems to me, regardless of what you teach or what your subject is or what your skill is. Whatever you have to contribute has a social dimension. And I think it's ineffective to try to impose that on anybody. Sharing it with them is one thing, but trying to impose it is another. You honestly say these are my ideas and I have a right to my opinion, and if I have a right to my opinion then you have a right to your opinion."You can't have an individual right. It has to be a universal right. I have no rights that everybody else doesn't have. There's no right I could claim that anybody else in the world can't claim, and I have to fight for their exercising that right just like I have to fight for my own. That doesn't mean I have to impose my ideas on people, but it means I have a responsibility to provide whatever light I can on the subject and share my ideas with people.
— Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
A sex worker deserves a billion times more respect, than the mystical fraudsters of the society, such as astrologers, psychics and tarot card readers.
— Abhijit Naskar
For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood.
— K. Martin Beckner, A Million Doorways
You’re a scientist. And there is no greater expression of sheer stupid human hope than the study of science. We’re born groping around in the dark but science says, “We can understand this.” It says, “There’s something here to understand and this act of blindly reaching forward is worth it.” It says, “You could be devoting your entire career to what’s really a dead end and it's still worth it. You could be dismissed in your own lifetime, you could poison yourself with radiation, you could be executed. And it’s still worth it. More than your safety, more than your life, that divine earthly act of trying to understand.”Personally, I find that brand of optimism exhausting but if it wasn’t for science, we wouldn’t have deodorant or instant coffee, so.
— Jessica Best
Joni Mitchell had it right: "They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot." But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song: then they tore down the parking lot / and raised up a paradise
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
When our theories continually move us into more and more complicated explanations then, it is certain that we are moving in the wrong direction.
— R.A.Delmonico
Eureka!"s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.
— Connie Willis, Bellwether
Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Similarly, sexual desire is good, so if men rape for sex (rather than to express anger towards women), rape would not be as evil. Rape is evil; therefore the claim that men rape for sex cannot be correct. More generally, what people instinctively like is good, so if people like beauty, beauty would be a sign of worth. Beauty is not a sign of worth, so the claim that people like beauty cannot be correct.These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good). Feminism would lose nothing by giving them up.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
No Lord Almighty created the humans out of personal will. Creationism is simply a myth created by the weak and ignorant humans out of a psychological need to have a sense of eternal security.
— Abhijit Naskar, We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.
— Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum
Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Politicized science is like a prostitute with an STD. You know she has been fucked by a dirty politician.
— A.E. Samaan
It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.
— Jeanette Winterson
There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Changing the spelling of one's name to ensure success, performing rituals for good luck, wearing colored gem stones for success in business – all these fall into the same category of psychological reinforcement. Hence, emerged the blood-sucking professions of astrology, palmistry, vastushastra, numerology etc. The very existence of these fraudulent professions is predicated on the fear and anxiety of vulnerable masses. Thus, a person’s superstitious beliefs become the tool of exploitation in the hands of ruthless fraudsters.
— Abhijit Naskar
It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).
— Abhijit Naskar, Prescription: Treating India's Soul
Common people tend to term any kind of bizarre phenomenon as “paranormal” or “supernatural”. They often exaggerate it as the work of the Gods. Behind this belief is nothing but primitive ignorance. Social progress means that people must (a necessity, not a luxury) align their beliefs and behavior to new knowledge and understanding of nature.
— Abhijit Naskar
...people taking the time and energy to ask about what they do not understand - I have renewed hope that society can shed its superstitions and embrace the enlightenment that comes from just a basic understanding of how the universe works.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
…once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…
— Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End
It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Neuroscientists rarely have to grapple with the issue of presentism versus existentialism. But in practice, neuroscientists are implicitly presentists. They view the past, present, and future as fundamentally distinct, as the brain makes decisions in the present, based on the memories of the past, to enhance our well being in the future. But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog theory in physics and philosophy.
— Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.
— Reinhold Messner
In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
— Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?"This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.
— Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite.The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all.Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives: -our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and -the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
In order to create, equilibrium must be broken.
— Daniel Parris
The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica
We derive vitamin D from the sunshine, and hence it can also be considered as "day" vitamin.
— Dr Sivakumar Gowder
Vitamin D can be considered as vitamin of "defense" since it cures several diseases.
— Dr Sivakumar Gowder
Culture” is essential for human life and also the life of a cell.
— Dr Sivakumar Gowder
Why would science ever recognize God that would make [them] accountable for their crimes against [him].
— Craig Smedley
What is salvation for humans? The answer is simple: Salvation is to perpetuate our existence via science!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
Will those insights be tested,or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the "science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions.
— Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Will those insights be tested, or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the "science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions.
— Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Until now psychologists only factored in emotional and physical gratification while studying subjects, but believe me I'm coining a new term: VIRTUAL GRATIFICATION, which will become a new form of craving in near future. Watch On!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night.Astronomers are goths.
— Brian Cox, Forces of Nature
The objection that science is self-correcting and thus needs no outside interference overlooks, first, that every enterprise is self-correcting (look at what happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II) and, secondly, that in a democracy the self-correction of the whole which tries to achieve more humane ways of living overrules the self-correction of the parts which has a more narrow aim -- unless the parts are given temporary independence. Hence in a democracy local populations not only will, but also should, use the sciences in ways most suitable to them. The objection that citizens do not have the expertise to judge scientific matters overlooks that important problems often lie across the boundaries of various sciences so that scientists within these sciences don't have the needed expertise either. Moreover, doubtful cases always produce experts for the one side, experts for the other side, and experts in between. But the competence of the general public could be vastly improved by an education that exposes expert fallibility instead of acting as if it did not exist. (Chapter 19)
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
The roots of Self begin in consciousness and cease in awareness. The fourth state of consciousness is one of biophotonic origin. However, it has nothing to do with religious, political or scientific endeavours. It is that which creates governments, religions, sciences and, in our insane world, politics...
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
After the knowledge of, and obedience to, the will of God, the next aim must be to know something of His wisdom, power and goodness as evidenced by His handiwork.
— james joule
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
. . . the abandonment of metaphysics involves more than the redefinition of the nature of rational inquiry in accordance with the tenets of modern scientific methodology this redefinition itself makes matters of value and validity mere matters of opinion.
— Alan White, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel And The Problem Of Metaphysics
Science says that and sociable and not in both shoes you could be happy.
— Deyth Banger
If Time travel were possible, the future would have already taught the present to teach the past how to do it.
— Atom Tate
Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a “negativity bias” that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we’re feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that “animals try to spread their genes.” That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can’t help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes “try” to spread themselves by wiring animals’ brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Believing is a disposition. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing takes no toll.
— Willard Van Orman Quine
Science is most definitely not a priesthood where people stand on a mountain and pass truths down to the waiting minions below.
— Brian Cox
All humanity needs, is to be reminded that there has always existed a human consensus on all common human needs and desires (extremely long life in perfect health, abundance, well-being), and that now, transgressing the religious option, he has achieved the scientific option of working for all of them, and for much more.His rationality, guided by both his ambition and inspiration, will do the rest.WHATEVER RELIGION PROMISES, SCIENCE WILL DELIVER.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his beliefs rests in faith for a reality that is intangible.
— VD.
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his belief rests in the faith of the intangible – a reality that stands outside of ourselves who are the observers. The poet on the other hand realizes that concepts like Truth and Beauty form the root of our reality, and lie not in the fleeting nature of appearances, but in the eternal universal aspects of humanity.
— VD,
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his belief rests in the faith of the intangible – a reality that stands outside of ourselves who are the observers. The poet on the other hand realizes that concepts like Truth and Beauty form the root of our reality, and lie not in the fleeting nature of our world, but in the eternal universal aspects of humanity.
— VD.
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his belief rests in the faith of the intangible –– a reality that stands outside of ourselves who are the observers. The poet on the other hand realizes that concepts like Truth and Beauty which form the root of our reality and identities lie not in the fleeting nature of our world, but in the eternal universal aspects of humanity.
— VD.
The sacred texts of human history from all over the world, can never be perceived by the rational mind as texts of historical accuracy. They can only be a glaring representation of the traditions and ideals of the people. Now, it is up to the rational mind, to analyze those texts and thereafter consume the good elements from them, while discarding the rest.
— Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Buddha: The First Sapiens
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his belief rests in the faith of the intangible –– a reality that stands outside of ourselves who are the observers. The poet on the other hand realizes that concepts like Truth and Beauty lie not in the fleeting nature of our world, but in the eternal aspects of humanity which form the root of our reality and identities.
— VD.
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his belief rests in the faith of the intangible; a reality that stands outside of the observer. The poet on the other hand, concentrates his attention on the source of the experience. In contrast to the scientist, the poet realizes that Truth and Beauty lie not in the fleeting nature of our world, but in the eternal aspects of humanity that is the root of this reality and of ourselves.
— VD.
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his beliefs rests in the faith of a reality that is intangible, one that stands outside of the observer. The poet on the other hand, concentrates his attention on the source of the experience, because he realizes that true identities lie not in the fleeting nature of our world, but in the eternal aspects of humanity that is the root of this reality and of ourselves .
— VD.
The scientist is more religious than the poet because his beliefs rests in the faith of a reality that is intangible.
— VD.
Mankind has uncovered two extremely efficient theories: one that describes our universe's structure (Einstein's gravity: the theory of general relativity), and one that describes everything our universe contains (quantum field theory), and these two theories won't talk to each other.
— Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond
Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods.
— Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates
A = A is a simplification, one so radical that it sometimes utterly distorts reality. It skins reality alive. Is A = A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A = A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are just that - very, very simplified representations. Symbolic systems with massive powers. But symbolic systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to the richness of that which they attempt to represent. Symbol systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to science's greatest mystery, cosmic creativity.
— Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates
Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)...Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells.According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.
— Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.
— Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
Us" versus "them" is not in our genes. It is something we learn.
— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil
Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?
— Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders
In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences.
— Alister E. McGrath
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large.Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary.[Part 2]I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state.Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.
— Albert Einstein
Swimming the ocean a giant brain watches us.
— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
That Science thing "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" Well this is not true if you hit someone much bigger then you.
— Chuck Bridges
There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree
You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on.
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants
— Isaac Newton
if all of life were an illusion then the instruments science would use to measure reality could not be depended upon.
— Chuck Bridges
In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times.
— Eraldo Banovac
For us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.
— Albert Einstein
Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats’s famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite.
— Ross Andersen
If that king was unsuitable in his service and duty...then his place will never be vacant and a foot soldier will lead the way though he remains nameless
— Prakhar Singh
The main thing is to keep THE MAIN THING the main thing
— stefan calin
The real point is this: We don't know where to go because we don't know what we are. Do you want to go back to living in a sewer-pipe? And eating other people's garbage? Because that's what rats do. But the fact is, we aren't rats anymore. We are something Dr. Schultz has made. Something new.
— Robert C. O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
What people these days watch!?...Nothing useful!Science proofs that people watch shit over and over and over and over and over and over.
— Deyth Banger, 4 Hours
The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.
— Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
There is no definitive answer as to why cannibalism provides us with such stimulation, although what is clear, and what remains extremely disturbing for me, is our increasing desensitization to violence and gore - a trait that does not bode well for the future.
— Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History
The future is just a projection of the past.
— Vivake Pathak, God and Destiny
Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Krishna Cancer
God is the set of all the laws of nature.
— Vivake Pathak, God and Destiny
Geckos could caught by hand, but they could be found in the men's room.
— Deh Gel
If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?
— Carl Sagan
The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.
— Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas
It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light.
— Erwin Chargaff
Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' "superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line "humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity?
— Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
Mysticism and supernaturalism are the descendants of ignorance and fear.
— Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas
[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.
— Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science
I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Science is theology for an atheist
— Munia Khan
Science faculties at renowned research institutions were given two identical CVs to assess. Half the scientists received a CV with a female name, and half with a male name. The 'female' applicant was consistently rated as less competent and less hireable, and the scientists were less likely to want to mentor her. The 'male' candidate was offered a significantly higher starting salary
— Emer O'Toole, Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the worst way to explain the mysteries of life, except for Creationism.
— Roberto Quaglia