Famous Society Quotes

"We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it." You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
-- William Of Conches

...anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolution" in the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
-- Ernst Mayr

...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
-- Thomas Sowell

...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
-- Carroll Quigley

...far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
-- Richard Mitchell

...in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
-- Arthur Koestler

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
-- Eric Hoffer

...it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
-- F A Hayek

...mammalian embryos, regardless of their sex chromosome constitutions, have an inherent tendency to develop the female phenotype; the mammalian male is essentially a female that has been exposed to androgenic steroid hormones.
-- S Ohno

...man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.
-- Arthur Koestler

...most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
-- Ernst Mayr

...one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
-- Arthur Koestler

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.
-- Arthur Koestler

...the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
-- Arthur Koestler

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.
-- Eric Hoffer

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
-- Robert G Ingersoll

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
-- Alfred Adler

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.
-- Eric Hoffer

A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.
-- Finley Peter Dunne

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck