The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to cons...ciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made... any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today--but the core of s...cience fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20...th century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked ...for no spell to cast over nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, th...ey do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human ...imaginative values which science has evolved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of s...imple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The acceptance of a theory as true does involve a personal choice in a way that a law does not. Different people do differ about t...heories; they can choose whether or no they will believe them; but people do not differ about laws; there is no personal choice; universal agreement can be forced. Again, if we look at the history of science, we shall find that the great advances in theory are more closely connected with the names of the great men than are the advances in law. Every important theory is associated with some man whose scientific work was notable apart from that theory; either he invented other important theories or in some way he did scientific work greatly above the average. On the other hand there are a good many well-known laws which are associated with the names of men who, apart from those particular laws, are practically unknown; they discovered one important law, but they have no claim to rank among the geniuses of science. That fact seems to indicate that a greater degree of genius is needed to invent true theories than to discover true laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »