Evolution of Thought Quotes

Lincoln was a flip flopper in the best sense of the word.

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives.

It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.

The standard theory may survive as a part of the ultimate theory, or it may turn out to be fundamentally wrong. In either case, it will have been an important way-station, and the next theory will have to be better.

Once Ptolemy and Plato, yesterday Newton, today Einstein, and tomorrow new faiths, new beliefs, and new dimensions.

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

If the past is any guide our [current] beliefs will be wrong as our past beliefs have been wrong.

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

Times change, people change, thought and feeling take new shapes, put on fresh garments, sons bow their heads unwillingly to that which enraptured their fathers.

At the beginning Scully was much more sceptical than she is now.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

A change of heart is the essence of all other change, and it has brought about me a reeducation of the mind.

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.

What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.