Quote by Philip Plait on Pseudoscience and its Effects
“Pseudoscience is like a virus. At low levels, it’s no big deal, but when it reaches a certain threshold it becomes sickening.”
Philip Plait
Author Archive for: Jan
Entries by Jan
Albert Jay Nock on the Origin of the State Through Conquest
“The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.”
Albert Jay Nock
Common Sense Is Not So Common – Voltaire Quote
“Common sense is not so common.”
Voltaire
Quote by Paul Feyerabend on the Limits of Methodologies
“My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.”
Paul Feyerabend
Quote by Gore Vidal on the Unfed Mind
“The unfed mind devours itself.”
Gore Vidal
You give birth to that on which you fix your mind – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“You give birth to that on which you fix your mind”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Albert Jay Nock Quote on Political and Social Change
“It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.”
Albert Jay Nock
Quote by Philip Plait on Ignorance and Anti-intellectualism
“I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.”
Philip Plait
Quote by Paul Feyerabend on Rationality and Method
“It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, “objectivity,” “truth,” it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.”
Paul Feyerabend
Quote by Werner Karl Heisenberg on Wholeness and Complementarity
“There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.”
Werner Karl Heisenberg