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The world’s prize stupid oaf is the man who thinks he already has all the answers.

— John W. Campbell

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More quotes by John W. Campbell

A successful crackpot is still a crackpot.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.

Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine (1965)

The curve of progress in the physical sciences is, assuredly, still rising rapidly. But I wonder how fast the curve of human-effort-invested-per-discovery-achieved is rising?

Logic happens to be one of the levels of reality; ignoring it is perfectly possible, just as it is possible for a drunken driver to ignore the concrete-and-steel bridge abutment in his path. The difficulty is that logic—like the bridge-abutment—won’t ignore the individual man.

Hypnosis has been a seriously neglected factor of the human mind; now it must be attacked as a major engineering problem. For once, we have an aspect of the mind that ties directly into a solid engineering job; it will require that psychology submit to that harshest of all disciplines—the absolutely inflexible, utterly autocratic, uncompromisingly dogmatic discipline of “Does it work?”

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John W. Campbell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.