A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause. — Peter Medawar Copy Share
Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs. — Peter Medawar Copy Share
Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed:… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. — Peter Medawar Copy Share
I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility;… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that… — Peter Medawar Copy Share
