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" 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. "

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" Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers. "

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" We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images. "

" Great books are rare. "

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

" Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life. "

" Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. "

" Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion. "

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" The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school. "

" One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing. "

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Doing

Power

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

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New

Each

" 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. "

" What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power. "

" The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull. "

" 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. "

Ian Hacking

Facts

Society

" The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work. "

" One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered. "

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

" The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things. "

" 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.' "

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

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

" Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them. "