Paul Feyerabend Quotes

The attitude of the Church was not as dogmatic as is often assumed. Interpretations of Bible passages had been revised in the light of scientific research before. Everyone regarded the earth as spherical and as freely floating in space though the Bible tells a different story. ~ Paul Feyerabend

A Universal Good should reflect the reality of the individual benefits that are collected under its name, not the other way around. ~ Paul Feyerabend

There is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Somewhere among the commotion I grew rather depressed. The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen-is it here or isn't it? No sign of it. Perhaps it's asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV-Good Morning America, David what's-his-name, a guy I can't stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk-and here she is, my faithful depression: "Did you think you could leave without me?" I had often warned my students not to identify with their work. I told them, "if you want to achieve something, if you want to write a book, paint a picture, be sure that the center of your existence if somewhere else and that it's solidly grounded; only then will you be able to keep your cool and laugh at the attacks that are bound to come." I myself had followed this advice in the past, but now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense. I often wished I had never written that fucking book. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend

Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it. ~ Paul Feyerabend

When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Yes, the academic world is screwed up, and there is nothing you can do about it. But don't worry about that. Just do what you want. If you know what you want to do and advocate for it, no one will put any energy into stopping you. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are ... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition. ~ Paul Feyerabend

What is surprising is that almost all the trends that developed within the sciences, Aristotelianism and an extreme Platonism included, produced results, not only in special domains, but everywhere; there exist highly theoretical branches of biology and highly empirical parts of astrophysics. The world is a complex an many-sided thing. ~ Paul Feyerabend

First-world science is one science among many; by claiming to be more it ceases to be an instrument of research and turns into a (political) pressure group. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense. ~ Paul Feyerabend

The only absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths. ~ Paul Feyerabend

The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background . This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test. ~ Paul Feyerabend

All religion may be centered around a generally good idea, however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards ~ Paul Feyerabend

Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Early Chinese thinkers had taken variety at face value. They had favored diversification and collected anomalies instead of trying to explain them away. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. ~ Paul Feyerabend

There is no "scientific worldview" just as there is no uniform enterprise "science"- except in the minds of metaphysicians, school masters, and scientists blinded by the achievements of their own particular niche ... There is no objective principle that could direct us away from the supermarket "religion" or the supermarket "art" toward the more modern, and much more expensive supermarket "science." Besides, the search for such guidance would be in conflict with the idea of individual responsibility which allegedly is an important ingredient of a "rational" or scientific age. ~ Paul Feyerabend

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback. A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed. ~ Paul Feyerabend

There is no coherent knowledge , i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information , obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains. ~ Paul Feyerabend

A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power . A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Results from a given approach are " facts " as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed ~ Paul Feyerabend

Human paint, produce films and videos; they dance, dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build houses start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons- and so on ... They contain patterns, press the practitioners to "conform" and in this way mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Confronted with such a variety most philosophers try to establish one approach to the exclusion of all others. As far as they are concerned there can only be one true way- and they want to find it. Thus normative philosophers argue that knowledge is a result of the application of certain rules, they propose rules which in their opinion constitute knowledge and reject what clashes with them. ~ Paul Feyerabend

In a war a totalitarian state has a free hand. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state. ~ Paul Feyerabend

If the world is an aggregate of relatively independent regions, then any assumption of universal laws is false and a demand for universal norms tyrannical : only brute force (or seductive deception) can then bend the different moralities so that they fit the prescriptions of a single ethical system. And indeed, the idea of universal laws of nature and society arose in connection with a life-and-death battle: the battle that gave Zeus the power over the Titans and all other gods and thus turned his laws into the laws of the universe. ~ Paul Feyerabend

One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Humane science must be adapted to the requirements of a balanced and rewarding life. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Events and developments, such as ... the Copernican Revolution, ... occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound by certain "obvious" methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them. ~ Paul Feyerabend

So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Rationalism ... is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God. ~ Paul Feyerabend

I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves ~ Paul Feyerabend

No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain ~ Paul Feyerabend

The sciences of today are business enterprises run on business principles. Research in large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion, and the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is - which means military matters. ~ Paul Feyerabend

It is not true that men prefer foolish women. Rather they prefer women who can simulate foolishness whenever necessary, which is the very core of intelligence. ~ Paul Eldridge

It's a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone. ~ Paul T. Scheuring

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide, ~ Paul Monette

This is the girl, here, this girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it - illness, syndrome, condition - can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness.

Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible a ~ Andrew Solomon

Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers. ~ Jean-Paul Marat

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track.
Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head.
Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since th ~ Frederick Buechner

Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy. ~ Ron Paul

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much. ~ Lionel Blue

The total number of galaxies in the universe seems to be in the region of ten billion, and that each of them has about a hundred billion stars the size of the sun. These numbers are so absurd that I strangely find myself in a good mood. It's all so immense. I think Paul feels a bit like this as well. There is so little I can do to make a difference. It is liberating. ~ Erlend Loe

Destiny helpers often appear disguised as dreadful beggars. May God give you wisdom to discern and honor them. ~ Paul Bamikole

It is more necessary than ever to intensify liturgical life ... by means of an appropriate formation ... of all the faithful ... ~ Pope John Paul II

As our organized system perfects itself, there is less "open" environment. It is hard for a social animal to grow when there is not an open margin to grow in: some open space, some open economy, some open mores, some activity free from regulation...A society cannot have decided all possibilities beforehand and have structured them. If society becomes too tightly integrated and pre-empts all the available space, materials and methods... when time, clothes, opinions and goals become so regulated that people feel they cannot be "themselves" or create something new, they bolt and look for fringes and margins, loop-holes, holes in the wall, or they just run. ~ Paul Goodman

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies

Pope John Paul didn't die - he pre-boarded. ~ Christopher Titus

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind. ~ Paul Tillich

The people who attacked Mr. Paul are much more concerned with staying in power than they are with protecting my family and yours. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Both sides of the political spectrum must one day realize that limitless government intrusion in the economy, in our personal lives, and in the affairs of other nations cannot serve the best interests of America. ~ Ron Paul

The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe and that it teaches the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind; words, images and ideas. ~ Paul Baran

I look for challenges to keep me going. ~ Paul Pierce

The miracle," Claire said, "is that anybody stays together. ~ Paul Russell

Jesus said when you pray say "Our Father which art in heaven." He did not say "Our Judge which art in heaven". #grace #gospel ~ John Paul Warren

When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk. ~ Rand Paul

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Animals don't have anyone to protect them. If we don't stand up, the people who are harming animals will never get stopped. ~ Paul Rodriguez

Freedom is in the Now ~ Arnaud Saint-Paul

A tiny number of very rich people, including fat cat bankers like us, are sucking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the wealth. And that gap will continue to widen, because with all our extra capital we go and buy up all the assets, so that for instance when Chang working down there in Spar needs somewhere to live, he has to rent his house from me, meaning that I'm getting most of his wages too. Now, provided you're me and not Chang, that's good news. But if you are Chang, then not only is your slice of the pie shrinking, but there are also more and more Changs trying to get a bite of it. ~ Paul Murray

The well from which we receive grace is only filled by sharing it with others. --- Charles James's Diary ~ Richard Paul Evans

The connoisseur's hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so. ~ Paul J. Griffiths

Take Over Your Own Mind. You only need to tell your mind that it must follow a New Plan. Yes, begin by bossing your own mind. You are the Master. If the Master gives no order, then the mind assumes there is no plan, and whatever wind comes through blows you along with it.

Paul J Coleman. BOSS CORE (Kindle Locations 56-58). ic7 Unique ~ Paul J. Coleman

He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen. ~ Paul Auster

The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time. ~ Paul Davies

We have to ask ourselves, 'What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants?' ~ Paul Hawken

To me, there is no greater threat than our debt. I'm the only fiscal conservative on the stage because I'm willing to hold the line on all spending. ~ Rand Paul

All life depends on organic reactions.
A favorite saying. ~ Paul Doughty Bartlett

Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith. ~ Pope John Paul II

If I had the flag that Betsy Ross worked so hard on, I wouldn't destroy it. I'd put it up on EBay because it's gotta be worth some serious coin. And that is the American way. ~ Paul Provenza

We are not an inferior class. I am inferior to no man. None of us are. It is a myth. A manmade creation. It can be unmade, and it should be, and it will be. ~ Michael Paul Michaud

Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the mother's womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and 'understands' with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the 'beginning', the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings - not only towards her own child, but every human being - which profoundly marks the woman's personality. ~ Pope John Paul II

The economics favour one-man comedy shows: all you need is one person, a microphone and a PA system. But I'm pleased so many people are making a living out of comedy - it's a wonderful business to be in. ~ Paul Merton

I have always quested and still do for the Holy Grail, but I stopped looking in the earthen caves and in the stars. I started questing through the valleys and mountains of my own soul. ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

When America's creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time. The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt. ~ Paul Craig Roberts

There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises. ~ Paul Krugman

In order to make a success of old age, one must begin it earlier, and not try to postpone it as long as possible. In the middle of life we must stop to think, to organize our existence with an eye to a still distant future, instead of allowing ourselves to be entirely sucked into the professional and social whirl. It is then that it is important to give place little by little to less external activities, less technical and more cultural, which will survive the moment of retirement. ~ Paul Tournier

We're in a situation now where fewer and fewer small films get made. People want these big giant tentpole sort of things, and I don't know, it's getting harder and harder to make a small movie. ~ Paul Reubens

Where men of fine feeling are concerned there is seldom misunderstanding. ~ John Paul Jones

[B]y requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based. ~ John Paul Stevens

He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And ... he's wonderful. - Tim Latimer ~ Paul Cornell

Life is lived only once. And the less seriously the better. ~ Paul Bowles