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Karl Popper

Quote of Karl Popper - The history of science, like the...


Biography - Karl Popper:

Austrian and British philosopher and professor.
Born: 1902 - Died: 1994
Period:
20th century
Place of birth: Austria
Austria

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities—perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.



See also 

See also...






Quotes for: mistake


Quotes

Quotes about mistake:


Love truth, but pardon error.





What is tolerance? It is the endowment of humanity. We are all steeped in weakness and error; let us forgive each other our stupidities, that is the first law of nature.





Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.





Any man can make mistakes.





I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong.





Without music, life would be a mistake.











Quotes for: to learn


Quotes

Quotes for: to learn


Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.





It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.





What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.





The best means of learning to know oneself is seeking to understand others.





When you lose, don't lose the lesson.





You shall learn to laugh. Now, all higher humor begins with this, that one no longer takes one's person seriously.











Quotes for: science


Quotes

Quotes about science:


Science without conscience is only ruin of the soul.





The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.





Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science.





Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.





Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.





Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.











Quotes for: History


Quotes

Quotes about history:


What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.





Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.





Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.





Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.





What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.





If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.











Quotes for: progress


Quotes

Quotes for: progress


A great part of progress consists in the desire to make progress.





To progress, it is not enough to want to act, one must first know in which direction to act.





The reasonable man adapts himself to the world : the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.





World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.





Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.





The real democratic progress is not to lower the level of the elite toward that of the crowd, but to raise that of the crowd toward the elite.











Quotes

Karl Popper also said...


A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.





Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.





Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.





No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.





We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.





Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.












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