Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Practically, Science is true; and Faith is foolish.

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

School has no task more important than to teach strict thought, cautious judgment, and logical conclusions, hence it must pay no attention to what hinders these operations, such as religion, for instance.

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

Science is not wisdom.