Robert Eklund’s Quotes Page |
| ... a sundry collection of quotes I appreciate. |
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Delay is the deadliest form of denial. |
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Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18. |
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem–neat, plausible, and wrong. |
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Whatever we may want to say, we probably won’t say exactly that. |
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Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. |
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Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. |
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It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. |
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Life is an experiment without a control group. |
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[T]he strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have. |
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Language was invented so that people could conceal their thoughts from each other. |
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[L]inguists are effectively the last defenders of human uniqueness. They appear to take their job seriously. |
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The real reason for the apparent discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds is that all closely related hominids have become extinct. /.../ A gap is defined by both its sides. Only 40,000 years ago, that gap between the human and nonhuman mind would have been a lot smaller as we shared the planet with Homo neanderthaliensis and Homo florisiensis. In an important sense, then, to explain today’s apparent discontinuity, is to explain why these species went extinct and only ours survived. /.../ Today, our closest living relatives, the apes, are also all at the verge of extinction (and humans no doubt have had a hand in that). To our great grandchildren the discontinuity between human and nonhumans minds may be even wider when their closest living relatives are monkeys, not apes. |
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Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. |
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[T]he vicissitudes of a century of revelations in physics warn us not to be dogmatic. There could be more levels of structure in our universe than are dreamt of in today’s physics. |
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Whenever you go beyond human scales, counterintuitive things happen, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen in the last century. If we go very fast, time slows down. If you make a star very massive, eventually you’ll get a black hole. If you make something very small, it can be in two places at once. I fully expect the true nature of reality to be weird and counterintutive. |
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String theory seems not so much a theory of everything in our universe as a theory of everything else. |
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We live in a society where it’s considered OK for intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate. |
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Our job is to figure out the way nature is, not to tell it how to behave. |
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Faith is believing something you know ain’t true. |
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Science is often accused of being arrogant. I don’t think it’s arrogant enough. In fact, I think the scientific method is essentially humble; if something cannot be proven, you must have have the humility to set it aside or abandon it, even if you have staked your career on it. |
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The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement. |
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[I]t is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true. |
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What makes scientific ideas scientific is not that they are right but they are capable of being proved wrong. |
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. |
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Every great scientific truth goes through three states: |
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When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. |
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Unless there is a law of physics forbidding a technology, then it is not only possible, it it sure to be built someday. |
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When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. |
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When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. |
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When people thought that science was unbiased and unbound by culture, they were simply wrong. On the other hand, when people thought that science was completely socially constructed, they were simply wrong. Bit if you believe that thinking science is unbiased is just as wrong as thinking that science is socially constructed, then your view is not even wronger than wrong. |
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Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairytales... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing. |
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[T]oo many people feel that they must invent alternate realities to justify human existence. Why does it matter if people cling to myths for solace? Because real-world problems such as climate change can only be solved by real-world thinking. Like it or not, the harsh reality is that nature doesn’t exist to serve humanity, and turning to myths that put humans at the centre of creation only distract us from appropriate actions. |
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[W]e shouldn’t believe in science because we think it’s certain, but precisely because it’s not. Certainty is totalitarian. |
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So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. |
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Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect. |
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[B]ehaviorists /.../ don’t believe in beliefs, they think that nothing can think, and in their opinion nobody has opinions. |
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The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; |
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Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought. |
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