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The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.

— Peter Medawar

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More quotes by Peter Medawar

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

No virus is known to do good: it has been well said that a virus is "a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein."

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Karl Popper’s conception of the scientific process is that is realistic – it gives a pretty fair picture of what goes on in real life laboratories.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions (1988)

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Henri Poincaré Science and Hypothesis (1901)

Attribution

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