Contradiction Quotes – Insights and Reflections

"No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient."

Arthur Miller

"Given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite."

Paul Feyerabend

"Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness."

Paul Feyerabend

"A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice."

Karl Popper

"Two left-handed gloves don't make a pair. Two half-truths don't make a truth."

Eduard Douwes Dekker

"“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

"The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Harry Gordon Frankfurt

"You can´t love animals and eat them too."

Vegane Weisheiten

"Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion."

Aleister Crowley

"There are two days in the year that we can not do anything, yesterday and tomorrow"

Mahatma Gandhi

"We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war."

Jimmy Carter

"There can be no scientific dispute with respect to faith, for science and faith exclude one another."

Rudolf Virchow

"No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?"

Rudolf Virchow

"The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths."

Paul Feyerabend

"No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain"

Paul Feyerabend

"An expropriating property protector (the state, through taxation) is a contradiction in terms"

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other."

Thomas Kuhn

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement."

Karl Popper