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…

- Peter Medawar

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

- Peter Medawar

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 …

- Peter Medawar

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

- Peter Medawar

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…

- Peter Medawar

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…

- Peter Medawar

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

- Peter Medawar

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.

- Peter Medawar

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

- Peter Medawar