If a little knowledge is dangerous – where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture – and very much to our credit.
If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.
The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins in the eyes of most people is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.
Freedom and order are not incompatible… truth is strength… free discussion is the very life of truth.
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.