We Hate The Very Idea

The Question Is Not How To Get Good People To Rule; The Question Is: How To Stop The Powerful From Doing As Much Damage As They Can To Us.

There Is An Almost Universal Tendency, Perhaps An Inborn Tendency, To Suspect The Good Faith Of A Man Who Holds Opinions That Differ From Our Own Opinions. It Obviously Endangers The Freedom And The Objectivity Of Our Discussion If We Attack A Person Instead Of Attacking An Opinion Or, More Precisely, A Theory.

There Can Be No Ultimate Statements Science: There Can Be No Statements In Science Which Can Not Be Tested, And Therefore None Which Cannot In Principle Be Refuted, By Falsifying Some Of The Conclusions Which Can Be Deduced From Them.

Astrologers Were Greatly Impressed, And Misled, By What They Believed To Be Confirming Evidence-so Much So That They Were Quite Unimpressed By Any Unfavorable Evidence. Moreover, By Making Their Interpretations And Prophecies Sufficiently Vague They Were Able To Explain Away Anything That Might Have Been A Refutation Of The Theory Had The Theory And The Prophecies Been More Precise. In Order To Escape Falsification They Destroyed The Testability Of Their Theory. It Is A Typical Soothsayer's Trick To Predict Things So Vaguely That The Predictions Can Hardly Fail: That They Become Irrefutable.

Man, Some Modern Philosophers Tell Us, Is Alienated From His World: He Is A Stranger And Afraid In A World He Never Made. Perhaps He Is; Yet So Are Animals, And Even Plants. They Too Were Born, Long Ago, Into A Physico-chemical World, A World They Never Made.