WEB > WEB's Quotes

“I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that!”
― Eminem

“I don't give a fuck, God sent me to piss the world off.”
― Eminem

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein

“In my opinion, we don't devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.”
― Bill Watterson

“Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam?

Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.”
― Albert Einstein

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”
― Claude Levi-Strauss

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.”
― Hippocrates

“Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
― John Maynard Keynes

“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“Changing mainstream media will be hard, but you can help create parallel options. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles, and more. You’ll enjoy it: I’ve had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation.

But it’s worth it, for one simple reason: pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science works.”
― Ben Goldacre, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction…”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.”
― Ben Goldacre, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England”
― C.G. Jung

“For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. ”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”
― Noam Chomsky

“With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“The basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy has to prove that its justified - it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five year old kid from trying to cross the street, that's an authoritarian situation: it's got to be justified. Well, in that case you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it - invariably. And when you look, most of the time those authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else - they are just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves- and that's a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you're looking at has to somehow catch people's interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.”
― Noam Chomsky