Truth-seeking

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, it is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Science lets questions determine the answers; Ideology lets answers determine the questions.

Science means following the questions where they lead, even if you don’t like what the results are telling you.

In science, every set of conclusions is just a status report. They say, “this is how far we’ve gotten in terms of figuring out what’s real.”

The scientific method is simply what we know about how not to fool ourselves.

Let us use science to discover truth. That done, let us use science and the humanities to guide our use of newly discovered truths. But let us recognize that the road to truth is forked, dimly lit, strewn with obstacles. We need, therefore, to recognize and to applaud the role of faith and the spiritual as founts of strength and of perseverance.

Make your books your companions.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

[The] issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

Readers no less than writers are the gatekeepers of truth.

Sages forever strive to be at one with truth. Their ideal – which they pursue earnestly but never achieve to perfection – is to grow into supreme human beings whose knowledge and behavior coincide with the nature of things and their earthly mission: with life and love.

… truth, or the conformity of thought to reality, is the sine qua non of vital efficacy. Health, pleasure, successful careers, and harmonious relationships require that we know the needs and capabilities of our nature, and the workings of the world. The absence of this knowledge leads to accidents, illness, suffering, failure, and death. Therefore, the first object of our desires should be truth, or the knowledge of ourselves and the world around us.

Don't believe everything you think.

A man who sees the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty, has wasted thirty years of his life.

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and quality in things than it really finds.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Good science requires distinguishing between "felt knowledge" and knowledge arising out of testable observations. "I am sure" is a mental sensation, not a testable conclusion. Put hunches, gut feelings, and intuitions into the suggestion box. Let empiric methods shake out the good from bad suggestions.

Good science is more than the mechanics of research and experimentation. Good science requires that scientists look inward--to contemplate the origin of their thoughts. The failures of science do not begin with flawed evidence or fumbled statistics; they begin with personal self-deception and an unjustified sense of knowing.

We want to be known for having original ideas, inspired hunches, and gut feelings that make a difference. Indeed, a "well-honed sixth sense"' is considered a measure of the good clinician. But being a good doctor also requires sticking with the best medical evidence, even if it contradicts your personal experience. We need to distinguish between gut feeling and testable knowledge, between hunches and empirically tested evidence.

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there afre known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know.

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations--always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder.

Thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers... of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good... They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.