It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or ….

It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A lov….

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but anothe….

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great b….

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in..

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it..

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from th….

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether i….

Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge..

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all..

I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose..

In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, no….

When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I….

The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws….

We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is, having t….

If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science ….

French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to t….

We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; b….

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up ….

Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provi….

Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist m….