When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are..

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be..

Acceptance means commitment, among other things..

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas..

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it fr….

The important thing is to be able to understand anyone who has something useful to say. - There is a general moral here. Be very careful and very cle….

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them..

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance..

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!.

We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to c….

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the socia….

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'..

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea..

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entiti….

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology..

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest ….

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state..

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench..

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is a….

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as mo….

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have th….