“If you can’t say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can.”

He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test and that they can be regarded as finally verified retires from the game.

The way of science is paved with discarded theories that were once declared self-evident.

The method of learning by trial and error – of learning from our mistakes – seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practiced by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees, or by men of science.

In philosophy methods are unimportant; any method is legitimate if it leads to results capable of being rationally discussed.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

Theology, I still think, is due to a lack of faith.

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.

The game of science is, in principle, without end.

The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities and that they interact by quantum physics.

“It can’t happen here” is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.

If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.

The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty, and both should be abandoned.

Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.

there is no independence and pertinacity of opinion like that of these seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince.

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.

Quiet those whispers that tell you, you’re not good enough.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.

Its always the quiet ones who love the loudest.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

My fear falls quiet with the way he speaks of me in his sleep.