Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

All Quotes by author - Ian Hacking

" All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them. "

" Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self. "

" Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. "

" Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality. "

" Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing. "

" A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order. "

" As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers. "

" Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century. "

" Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption. "

" Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian. "

" Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications. "

" Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past. "

" Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings. "

" Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do. "

" Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. "

" Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else. "

" Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed. "

" Great books are rare. "

" If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code. "

" If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser. "

" I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. "

" I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.' "

" In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy. "

" I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things. "

" It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences. "

" It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action. "

" It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules. "

" Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help. "

" Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world. "

" Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries. "

Check our other websites: