Nicholas Babb
nic[at]nicbabb[dot]com | Quotes
Misc Quotes
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of
enthusiasm."
-- Winston Churchill
"....we may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its
prophets."
-- Karl Popper, from his book: "Open Society and its Enemies"
"Certainty is the enemy of objective knowledge"
-- Karl Popper
"Specialization is for Insects."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18."
-- Albert Einstein
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of
our friends."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch."
-- Novalis
"Innocence, properly conceived, is a positive attribute. It is the ignorance
that comes from a voluntary decision not to engage (or not to engage yet) with
a particular area of complex knowledge. Innocence in that sense is essential
for all genuine learning. Compulsory teaching is the destruction of innocence,
forcing the victims to waste the opportunity, which comes only once in each
lifetime, to encounter that knowledge for the first time. It is no wonder,
then, that pumping information prematurely into people's minds simply triggers
emergency procedures that do everything in their power to shield the recipient
from engaging with that information, and that the usual result is the permanent
destruction of the recipient's ability to engage with information of that type.
How many people have a feeling that there is something rich and wonderful in
science, or in mathematics, or in Shakespeare, but that it is somehow
inaccessible to them? Is that not a tragedy? If they could have acted on that
same impulse innocently, at the moment when they were ready, what then could
possibly have spoiled those rich and wonderful areas of knowledge for them?"
-David Deutsch