Henry Mintzberg Quotes

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

Science is facts.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.

The heart of science is measurement.

Science is not gadgetry.

I'm first and foremost a scientist.

Data don't generate theory - only researchers do that.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both.

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.

It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way: They show a great respect for experiment and observation, They don't cherry pick data, They take a skeptical approach to what they do. And then scientists work together to get a consensus as to what should be believed And that generates very reliable knowledge and that reliable knowledge drives innovation

The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

In these researches I followed the principles of the experimental method that we have established, i.e., that, in presence of a well-noted, new fact which contradicts a theory, instead of keeping the theory and abandoning the fact, I should keep and study the fact, and I hastened to give up the theory.

I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute.