Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Great books are rare. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun. "

" Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life. "

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