„It may be boldly asked where can the man be found, possessing the extraordinary gifts of Newton, who could suffer himself to be deluded by such a hocus-pocus, if he had not in the first instance willfully deceived himself? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a condition to explain the conduct of Newton and of Newton’s school. To support his unnatural theory Newton heaps fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where he cannot convince. In whatever way or manner may have occurred this business, I must still say that I curse this modern theory of Cosmogony, and hope that perchance there may appear, in due time, some young scientist of genius, who will pick up courage enough to upset this universally disseminated delirium of lunatics.“
GoetheGoethe’s powerful quote on self-deception, truth, and the courage to stand against widespread madness – a philosophy classic.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, naturalist, and statesman of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is considered one of the most important figures in German literature.
A powerful call to reflect on self-deception and the courage to face truth—especially in times of scientific and societal doubt.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German writer, playwright, scientist, and statesman. His works include famous pieces such as "Faust" and "The Sorrows of Young Werther," significantly influencing German classicism and romanticism.
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"People give ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firma-ment, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth."
Martin Luther
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"You wonder that there are so few followers of the Pythagorean opinion [that the earth moves] while I am astonished that there have been any up to this day who have embraced and followed it.
Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true:
they have, through sheer force of intellect, done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to be the contrary.
For the arguments against the whirling [the rotation] of the earth we have already examined are very plausible, as we have seen; and the fact that the Ptolemaics and the Aristotelians and all their disciples took them to be conclusive is indeed a strong argument of their effectiveness.
But the experiences which overtly contradict the annual movement [the movement of the earth around the sun] are indeed so much greater in their apparent force that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief."
Salviati
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"“The [Theory of Relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.”"
Nikola Tesla
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"To fanciful minds and theoretical speculators, the so-called "science" of modern astronomy furnishes a field, unsurpassed in any science for the unrestrained license of the imagination, and the building up of a complicated conjuration of absurdities such as to overawe the simpleton and make him gape with wonder"
Thomas Winship
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"Many have been able to see through the delusions of modern astronomy. Letters from various parts testify that, in some cases, men and women have begun to make use of their brain-power, which had been stunted and dwarfed by acceptation, without the slightest proof, of the unscientific, unreasonable, unnatural and infidel teachings of men foisted upon a credulous public in the name of ‘Science.’ Others again, tell that the writers have thrown to the moles and to the bats the world-wide and almost universally believed hoax that we are living on a whirling sea-earth globe, revolving faster than a cannonball travels, rushing through ‘space’ at a rate beyond human power to conceive, and flying – with the whole of the so-called ‘solar system’ – in another direction twenty times the speed of its rotation."
Thomas Winship
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"For what I want to say here, knowledge of the book's content is not necessarily required, because it concerns easily understandable facts about the cause and nature of gravitation—the force that presses everything to the ground and is not easily harnessed permanently for propulsion purposes, the force that keeps all celestial bodies in their orbits and holds our entire universe together. How gravitation achieves the feat of creating the conditions for our earthly life remains unexplained by science to this day. Science only offers a series of competing model concepts here. Even the nature of gravitation is largely unknown to it. As Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) said at the time: "I have explained the celestial phenomena and the tides based on gravity, but I have not been able to derive the cause of the properties of gravity from the phenomena so far." Nothing has changed since then. One who must know because he struggled daily with the problem of overcoming it, the former deputy chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce aircraft engine works, A. V. Cleaver, summed it up as follows, I quote literally: "Gravity is truly a highly mysterious and elusive phenomenon. It seems questionable whether many people, even technically trained ones, realize how justified this claim is or whether they notice the conspiracy of silence with which gravity is treated in most physics textbooks. It is almost reminiscent of a Polynesian taboo or the Victorian attitude towards certain topics such as sex or particular organs and functions, which were deemed somewhat improper. The student learns that all bodies attract each other, that the stability of the universe is determined thereby, and the equations of Newton's laws describe their effects. Yet—unless he is a specialized graduate student of pure physics—he is still expected to accept the old idea of “action at a distance,” and it is quite unlikely that any of his teachers will draw his attention to our complete ignorance of the physical relationships between gravity and other phenomena, simply because we know nothing about it and because the academic world apparently prefers not to broadcast this fact!""
Otto Jung
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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