Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Great books are rare.
Acceptance means commitment, among other things.
I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'
Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.
Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life.
The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.
Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.
The final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.
One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.
Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.
In each case you settle on an act. Doing nothing at all counts as an act.
We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.
The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.
Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.
Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.
In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.
Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self.
Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.
It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.
Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.
By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.
Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.
The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.
It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action.
Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.
Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.
Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.
The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull.
A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.
If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code.
We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.
As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.
There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.
Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.
The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school.
One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing.
Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.
Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications.
Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.