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"Some fool has put the head of this nail on the wrong end." "You idiot, it's for the opposite wall!" To be sure, if the space of physical objects allowed motions of translation only, and not also rotations. That space has such geometry is a fantasy; experience shows otherwise. It is only experience that makes this complaint and the rejoinder a dialogue of madmen.

— Abraham Kaplan

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More quotes by Abraham Kaplan

Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

Experience is of particulars only.

Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.

We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.

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