It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
Interpretation
Believing things without enough evidence is universally incorrect.
This quote emphasizes the importance of rational thinking and evidence-based beliefs. It argues that accepting ideas or truths without sufficient evidence undermines the integrity of knowledge and understanding, and suggests that this principle is applicable universally, regardless of context or individual.
In practice
Introducing a discussion on the importance of critical thinking in a classroom setting.
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.
But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.
Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, _x000D_ divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.
What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.
Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette - the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.
Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn't just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea - I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.
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