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Copernicanism and other "rational" views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other "irrational" views had ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)

— Paul Karl Feyerabend Against Method (1975)

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Mind

More quotes by Paul Karl Feyerabend

Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.

Against Method (1975)

A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power.

Science in a Free Society (1978)

In a war a totalitarian state has a free hand.

Science in a Free Society (1978)

First-world science is one science among many; by claiming to be more it ceases to be an instrument of research and turns into a (political) pressure group.

Against Method (1975)

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

Against Method (1975)

All Paul Karl Feyerabend quotes →

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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)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

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