Peter Medawar Quotes

47 quotes in 891 categories

• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin…
• I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing…
• 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…
• Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.
• Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
• The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.
• How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of…
• There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.
• In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that…
• The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident…
• I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.
• French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use…
• The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the…
• I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a…
• We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is,…
• Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in…
• It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the…
• 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…
• The bells which toll for mankind are—most of them, anyway—like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must…
• When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to…

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