The Englishman, hidden behind his hedge or wall, is not interested in his neighbor's house, and the idea of wanting to read about ...houses bought, sold, or built by total strangers is not even funny; it is merely absurd.... But to an American, it is not only important, it is comforting, it is gratifying that other people are improving your home town; even people who have no personal economic stake in the rise of real-estate values feel the same kind of interest that makes a motherly woman smile with genuine amiability on the children of total strangers. The very linguistic difference between "house" and "home" is significant. All Americans who live in houses, not apartments, live in homes; the Englishman lives in his home but all his neighbors live in houses or flats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another ... if a man is ...a scientist, like me, he'll always say "Publish and be damned."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is ...cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opini...ons. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any adequate analysis or (if I may use the term) rational reconstruction of the method of science must comprise the statement that... the scientist qua scientist accepts or rejects hypotheses; and further that an analysis of that statement would reveal it to entail that the scientist qua scientist makes value judgments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the... pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum th...eory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »