Skip to content

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

— Peter Medawar

Another quote →

Topics

Philosophy

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.

All Peter Medawar quotes →

You may also like

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)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

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.