Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

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Source, in full

"Natural Kinds", in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969), p. 126; originally written for a festschrift for Carl Gustav Hempel, this appears in a context explaining why induction tends to work in practice, despite theoretical objections. The hyphen in "praise-worthy" is ambiguous, since it falls on a line break in the source.

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