"When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people."
―Karl Popper
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"We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
―Karl Popper |
"The future is always present, as a promise, a lure and a temptation."
―Karl Popper |
"In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime."
―Karl Popper |
"A system is empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation... It must be possible for an empirical or scientific system to be refuted by experience."
―Karl Popper |
"We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell."
―Karl Popper
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"We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."
―Karl Popper
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"A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others - not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others"
―Karl Popper
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"If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted."
―Karl Popper
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"Some scientists find, or so it seems, that they get their best ideas when smoking; others by drinking coffee or whisky. Thus there is no reason why I should not admit that some may get their ideas by observing, or by repeating observations."
―Karl Popper
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"There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them"
―Karl Popper
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"Man, some modern philosophers tell us, is alienated from his world: he is a stranger and afraid in a world he never made. Perhaps he is; yet so are animals, and even plants. They too were born, long ago, into a physico-chemical world, a world they never made."
―Karl Popper
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"The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition by having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them."
―Karl Popper
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"It is part of my thesis that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes."
―Karl Popper |
"If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men."
―Karl Popper |
"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
―Karl Popper
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"I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man."
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"I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a 'body of knowledge,' but rather as a system of hypotheses.."
―Karl Popper
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"The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty and both - precision and certainty are impossible to attain."
―Karl Popper |
"Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world."
―Karl Popper
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"We know a great deal, but our ignorance is sobering and boundless. With each step forward, with each problem which we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux."
―Karl Popper
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"The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts."
―Karl Popper
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"The use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible."
―Karl Popper
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"Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again."
―Karl Popper
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"Serious rational criticism is so rare that it should be encouraged. Being too ready to defend oneself is more dangerous than being too ready to admit a mistake."
―Karl Popper
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"Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves."
―Karl Popper
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"The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it."
―Karl Popper
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"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths."
―Karl Popper
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"It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness."
―Karl Popper |
"For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority."
―Karl Popper |
"Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake."
―Karl Popper |
"A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence."
―Karl Popper
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"If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them."
―Karl Popper |
"Historically speaking all or very nearly all scientific theories originate from myths."
―Karl Popper
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"There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world."
―Karl Popper
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"It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas."
―Karl Popper
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"The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world. To be constantly and almost exclusively interested in the medium - in spectacle-cleaning - is a result of a philosophical mistake."
―Karl Popper
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"The old scientific ideal of episteme - of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge - has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever."
―Karl Popper
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"My thesis is that what we call 'science' is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition-that of critically discussing the myth. ... In a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is."
―Karl Popper
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"Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it."
―Karl Popper
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"Our aim must be to make our successive mistakes as quickly as possible. To speed up evolution."
―Karl Popper
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