The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test you may pronounce... it true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though it seems improbable on the face of it You must master the huge retards and have faith in the slow... Blossoming of haystacks, stairways, walls of convolvulus, Until the moon can do no more. Exhausted, You get out of bed. Your project is completed Though the experiment is a mess.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics th...eory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.... Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who have handled sciences have either been men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they ...only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Argument is conclusive ... but ... it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless ...it finds it by the method of experiment.... For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns ... his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it ... that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a ...vital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fe...nd off madness and chaos.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and ...on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »