Science Guardian

“Every man has his price.” This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. - George Bernard Shaw.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us. - Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead.

Hereafter, when they come to model Heav’n, And calculate the Stars, How will they wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive, To save appearances, how grid the Sphere With Centric and Eccentric scribbl’d o’er, Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb. - John Milton, Paradise Lost

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians. - H.G.Wells.

The independent scientist who is worth the slightest consideration as a scientist has a consecration which comes entirely from within himself: a vocation which demands the possibility of supreme self-sacrifice. - Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

There is not a crime, there is not a vice which does not live in secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away. - Joseph Pulitzer.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy. - Samuel Johnson

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amusement. It is the essence of his being. - J. Robert Oppenheimer, lecture, 1954.

Want of tenderness is a sure sign of stupidity. - Samuel Johnson.

Madness … is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups. - Daniel Goleman of Harvard (after Nietsche).

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. - Friedrich Nietzsche

To be good is noble, but to tell others how to be good is nobler, and no trouble. - Mark Twain

We can hardly expect a committee to acquiesce in the dethronement of tradition. Only an individual can do that, an individual who is not responsible to the mob. Now that the truly independent man of wealth has disappeared, now that the independence of the academic man is fast disappearing, where are we to find the conditions of partial alienation and irresponsibility needed for the highest creativity? - Garrett Hardin, biologist and historian of science (1959)

Whatever system we adopt, it must be kind to rebels, and there must be no good-conduct prizes…If we do not train our students to think for themselves–perhaps it would be fairer to say, if we do not allow them to think for themselves–no opportunities that we provide in later life will be of much avail. - W.W. C. Topley, physician (1940)

The danger comes when scientists allow themselves to be organized, when they begin to respect and obeypronouncements on science by academies, universities, societies, and, finally, governments. May that day never come! - Clifford Truesdell, mathematical pfysicist and historian of science (1984)

Galileo wrote to the Grand Duchess Christina in a way, which is curiously resonant today: “Some years ago I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors – as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them.” - Michael Tracy

Rebel spirits like Louis Leakey and Alister Hardy are sadly becoming a rare and vanishing species in the scientific world, and it is the poorer for it. — Desmond Morris

I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on its way to extinction. - Barbara McClintock

Moving between fields is the way to be creative. Keep your fingers in a lot of pies. I do it because I’m curious. I’m the only person I know who goes into a poster session [at a scientific meeting] and stops at the first poster I have no idea what it’s about. Find the poster you don’t know anything about and look at it for a long time, and you might learn something totally different.- Kary Mullis

For Carruthers, the dawn of excitement came while he was a graduate student at Cornell. He had been studying quantum field theory, a subject that confused him because it seemed riddled with dogma rather than equations that were simple or elegant. “The nightmare of it always made me uneasy in my stomach,” he recalls. “I’d go to class and the students would sit there nodding their heads in rhythm to these incantations from the lectern, And I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘They all understand it and I don’t.’ I was sure they were all much brighter than I was.” Put off by the confusion, he was about to flee particle physics when Dr. Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Laureate, came to Cornell and taught a course on the subject. “He made complete fun of the ridiculous problems of field theory. And I thought, ‘My God, maybe I’m right. Maybe there’s a reason I don’t understand this stuff.’ That experience became the turning point in my development.” — Interview of Peter Carruthers, theoretical physicist and violinist, by William Broad (1984)

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen. It is assuming a superiority, and it is particularly wrong to question a man concerning himself. There may be parts of his former life which he may not wish to be made known to other persons, or even brought to his own recollection. - Samuel Johnson

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster but an opportunity. - Alfred North Whitehead.

When all funding for research intended to have an urgent public use is placed in one basket, the funding body is left empty-handed if the hypothesis is barren. Public commitment to a barren hypothesis introduces another prestige factor making it difficult to revise the hypothesis. That factor is the loss of face involved in admitting error. The need to keep up the appearance of the reliability of the scientific consensus thus locked AIDS science into a no-win predicament that becomes ever more intransigent as the futility of the hypothesis becomes ever more apparent.- Hiram Caton

The search for truth and justice is always in conflict with the search for wealth and popularity. That is the lesson of my life. - Michael Phillip Wright, Norman, Oklahoma

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God? - George Daagon.

Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment. - Thomas Mann

There has never been anything, however absurd, that myriads of people weren’t prepared to believe, often so passionately that they’d fight to the death rather than abandon their illusions. To me, that’s a good operational definition of insanity. - Arthur C. Clarke.

It is in the nature of a hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, generally grows stronger by every thing you see, hear, read or understand. - Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760)

There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics. - Mark Twain, Autobiography (1924)

Generally speaking, truth management is merely one application of the arts of persuasion, promotion, and propaganda. It is not distinguished by the novelty of its devices, but in the boldness of their application to the one patch of modern culture that is supposed to be impervious to these arts. The details of the promotion of the viral theory (of AIDS) show that managing truth is not an occasional lapse from rigid integrity. It is an indispensable tool, used daily by editors, grant bodies, policy-makers and the like, to shape the direction of otherwise “chaotic” science. To use an economic analogy, it replaces individualistic laissez-faire in discovery with “research management plans”. - Hiram Caton

Statistics are no substitute for judgment. - Henry Clay

Every man has some favourite topic of conversation, on which, by a feigned seriousness of attention, he may be drawn to expatiate without end.- Samuel Johnson

Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things. - Virgil, Georgics (36-29 BC)

“Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it is also a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong.”–Astronomer Allan Sandage.

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. - Thomas Paine.

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.- Stephen Jay Gould, in a lecture on evolution at Cambridge, 1984.

Nothing is more interesting to the true theorist than a fact which directly contradicts a theory generally accepted up to that time, for this is his particular work. - Max Planck, A Survey of Physics (1925).

Science advances funeral by funeral. - Max Planck

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue.—Winston Churchill

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. - Bertrand Russell.

You can’t convince a believer of anything, for their belief is not based on evidence, but a deep-seated need to believe. - Carl Sagan.

“When one person has a delusion they are considered crazy, when millions of people have the same delusion, they call it religion.” - Richard Dawkins

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better that it should go first than last. - Hugh Walpole

Most men can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread into the fabric of their lives. - Leo Tolstoy.

I am tired of this thing called science…. We have spent millions on that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped. - Senator Simon Cameron, 1861 (demanding that the funding of the Smithsonian Institution be cut off).

He who has never been deceived by a lie does not know the meaning of bliss. - Albert Einstein (letter to Elisa Lowenthal, April 30, 1912).

From a drop of water a logician could predict an Atlantic or a Niagara. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. - Theodosius Gregorievich Dobzhansky (title of his article in American Biology Teacher, 1973).

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. - Harold Fabing and Ray Marr, Fischerisms (1937)

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it. - Samuel Johnson

That’s what reporters do. They write about things people know nothing about, including themselves sometimes. - Andy Rooney.

Nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. - Voltaire

To act intelligently in human affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to understand the thoughts, motives, and apprehensions of one’s opponent so fully that one can see the world through his eyes. - Albert Einstein.

There are only two things, science and opinion; the former yields knowledge, the latter ignorance. - Hippocrates, Law (5th-6th Century BC)

Experimental evidence is strongly in favor of my argument that the chemical purity of the air is of no importance. - L. Erskine Hill, Lecturer on Physiology at London Hospital, in “Impure Air Not Unhealthful If Stirred and Cooked”, New York Times, Sept 22, 1912.

The universe consists only of atoms and the void: all else is opinion and illusion. - Edward Robert Harrison, Masks of the Universe (1985)

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1892)

It would be interesting to inquire how many times essential advances in science have first been made possible by the fact that the boundaries of special disciplines were not respected….Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science. - Wolfgang Kohler, Dynamics in Psychology (1940)

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. - Sir Peter Medawar, Science and Literature in Plato’s Republic (1984)

Freedom is for science what the air is for an animal. - Henri Poincare, Dernieres Pensees

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B. F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement (1969)

All problems are finally scientific problems. - George Bernard Shaw, Preface, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911)

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is condemnation without investigation.” - Herbert Spencer

It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena. - William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

Be enthusiastic. Remember the placebo effect - 30% of medicine is showbiz. - Ronald Spark, Medical World News, February 16 1981.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in the universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms. - George Wald, The Fitness of the Environment, by L. J. Henderson (1958)

Science is the topography of ignorance. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Medical Essays (1883)

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. - Clause Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

Every scientist is an agent of cultural change. He may not be a champion of change; he may even resist it, as scholars of the past resisted the new truths of historical geology, biological evolution, unitary chemistry, and non-Euclidean geometry. But to the extent that he is a true professional, the scientist is inescapably an agent of change. His tools are the instruments of change—skepticism, the challenge to established authority, criticism, rationality and individuality. - Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (1963)

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong. - Henrik Ibsen

It is always the minorities that hold the key to progress; it is always through those who are unafraid to be different that advance comes to human society. - Raymond B. Fosdick

One dog barks at something, the rest bark at him. - Chinese proverb.

Get your facts first, then you may distort them as much as you please. - Mark Twain.

A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better. - Stephen Leacock.

To believe with certainty, we must begin with doubting. - Stanislaus, King of Poland.

A ready man is made by conversation. He that buries himself among his manuscripts ‘besprent,’ as Pope expresses it, ‘with learned dust,’ and wears out his days and nights in perpetual research and solitary mediation, is too apt to lose in his elocution what he adds to his wisdom; and when he comes into the world, to appear overloaded with his own notions, like a man armed with weapons which he cannot wield. He has no facility of inculcating his speculations, of adapting himself to the various degrees of intellect which the accidents of conversation will present; but will talk to most unintelligibly, and to all unpleasantly. - Samuel Johnson.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one. - Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire.

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty. - Bertrand Russell.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. - Erich Fromm.

There are no facts, only interpretations. - Frederich Nietsche.

When a man of science speaks of his “data”, he knows very well what he means. Certain experiments have been conducted, and have yielded certain observed results, which have been recorded. But when we try to define a “datum” theoretically, the task is not altogether easy. A datum, obviously, must be a fact known by perception. But it is very difficult to arrive at a fact in which there is no element of inference, and yet it would seem improper to call something a “datum” if it involves inferences as well as observation. This constitutes a problem. - Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (1954)

‘For example’ is not proof. - Jewish proverb.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on your way to the pertinent answer, - Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973.

Truth never dies, but leads a wretched life. - Yiddish proverb.

In every generation there is some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it. - Boris Pasternak.

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. - Voltaire

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized: In the first it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third it is regarded as self-evident. - Arthur Schopenhauer.

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority. - Paul Tillich.

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. - Josh Billings.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.- Voltaire

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.- Vo