Critical Quotes - Page 27

• To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Views, Criticism

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2011). “The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change”, p.273, University of Chicago Press

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• The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

  Jean Piaget

  Education, Creativity, Science

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• We are ... led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.

  Bertrand Russell

  Taken, Mean, Science

  Bertrand Russell (1914). “Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy”

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• Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,-the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements.

  Humphry Davy

  Views, Order, Different

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• The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact would be all the greater.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Impact, Political

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• Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Environmental, Development

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• It was critical to finding a way out. I had assumed young women knew the history of feminism and must have felt gratitude to the movement for the opportunities that the work we have done has afforded them.

  Betty Buckley

  Gratitude, Opportunity, Feminist

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• Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Maturity, Discovery, Critical Moments

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• Forests and trees make significant direct contributions to the nutrition of poor households ... [as] rural communities in Central Africa obtained a critical portion of protein and fat in their diets through hunting wildlife from in and around forests. The five to six million tonnes of bushmeat eaten yearly in the Congo Basin is roughly equal to the total amount of beef produced annually in Brazil - without the accompanying need to clear huge swathes of forest for cattle.

  Frances Ford Seymour

  Science, Hunting, Community

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• Looking for honest ways to lift one another would . . . be more beneficial to our own self-esteem, for we would see more good in ourselves. We would cease to be so critical of our weaknesses and would find ways to allow our weaknesses to become strengths with God's help.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Honesty, Self Esteem, Weakness

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• In my humble opinion, we should now have reached peak oil. So it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty peak farewell.

  Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari

  Farewell, Humble, Oil

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• Through our inattention, we have wasted the years that we might have used to prepare for lessened oil supplies. The next ten years are critical.

  Kenneth S. Deffeyes

  Oil, Years, Might

  Kenneth S. Deffeyes (2006). “Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak”, p.12, Macmillan

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• Only three or four outs directly affect the outcome of any given game...One of the greatest challenges of pitching is to recognize these critical situations and rise to the occasion with consistency and a competitive spirit.

  Tom Seaver

  Softball, Sports, Motivation

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• It's the old story. You might be able to fool your coaches, or your teammates, or your opponents. But, you can never fool yourself in anything. I believe that the more critical you are of your own performance- the higher standards you have-the better you become at what you do.

  Don Maynard

  Softball, Sports, Motivation

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• What are the critical success factors of your job? What must you be absolutely, positively excellent at doing to be successful?

  Brian Tracy

  Softball, Sports, Jobs

  Brian Tracy (1998). “Mastering Your Time”, p.15, Jaico Publishing House

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• It is in the field of prayer that life's critical battles are lost or won. We must conquer all our circumstances there. We must first of all bring them there. We must survey them there. We must master them there. In prayer we bring our spiritual enemies into the Presence of God and we fight them there. Have you tried that? Or have you been satisfied to meet and fight your foes in the open spaces of the world?

  John Henry Jowett

  Spiritual, Prayer, Fighting

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• The next decade will perhaps raise us a step above despair to a cleaner, clearer wisdom and biology cannot fail to help in this. As we become increasingly aware of the ethical problems raised by science and technology, the frontiers between the biological and social sciences are clearly of critical importance-in population density and problems of hunger, psychological stress, pollution of the air and water and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources.

  H. Bentley Glass

  Stress, Science, Technology

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• No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment.

  William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

  Believe, Science, Discovery

  "The Art of Scientific Investigation".

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• In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Zero, Errors, Average

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• In design it is important to shoe the effect of an action. ... Feedback is critical.

  Donald A. Norman

  Shoes, Design, Important

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• I'm never critical or judgmental about whether or not a movie is any good. The way I look at it, if several hundred people got together every day for a year or so - a number of then willing to put on heavy makeup, wear clothes that weren't their own and pretend to be people other than themselves - and their whole purpose for doing all this was to entertain me, then I'm not gonna start worrying about whether or not they did a good job. The effort alone was enough to make me happy.

  George Carlin

  Jobs, Makeup, Years

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• One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.

  Ivan Pavlov

  Science, Animal, Brain

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• Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

  Joseph Joubert

  Appreciate, Crucible, Criticism

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• The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Criticism, Ridiculous, Synthetic

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• She had been critical of his new torch song, "A Side Order of Heartache, Please," suggesting it could be used as a good way to break in their new paper shredder.

  Woody Allen

  Funny, Song, Humor

  Woody Allen (2008). “Mere Anarchy”, p.122, Random House

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