The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
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 Image
If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
“Whichever form of revenge a scientist decides upon, whether to withdraw from cultural interests or to dazzle his fellow men with omniscience,… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities,… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a… — 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;… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It is naïve to suppose that the acceptance of evolution theory depends upon the evidence of a number of so-called "proofs"; it… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology… — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists… — 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 Image
[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. — Peter Medawar Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image