Peter Medawar Quotes

I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next. ~ Peter Medawar

All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small. ~ Peter Medawar

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally the new immunology was born. This is a science which to me has far greater potentialities both for practical use in medicine and for the better understanding of living process than the classical immunochemistry which it is incorporating and superseding. ~ Frank Macfarlane Burnet

Any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not not enough that a problem should be "interesting." ... The problem must be such that it matters what the answer is-whether to science generally or to mankind. ~ Peter Medawar

The bells which toll for mankind are - most of them, anyway - like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound. ~ Peter Medawar

A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming. ~ Peter Medawar

Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief ... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true. ~ Peter Medawar

Science is the art of the solvable. ~ Peter Medawar

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy. ~ Peter Medawar

Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case. ~ Peter Medawar

When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite. ~ Peter Medawar

In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive ... The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see. ~ Peter Medawar

It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools. ~ Peter Medawar

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries. ~ Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said - has been said - that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Molière who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose. ~ Peter Medawar

The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation. ~ Peter Medawar

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause. ~ Peter Medawar

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes. ~ Peter Medawar

Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another's work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt. ~ Peter Medawar

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known. ~ Peter Medawar

If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health. ~ Peter Medawar

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. ~ Peter Medawar

I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary ... ~ Peter Medawar

The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. ~ Peter Medawar

Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth. ~ Peter Medawar

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again. ~ Peter Medawar

There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare - particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for - that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer. ~ Peter Medawar

The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them. ~ Peter Medawar

There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. It is not even distinctively intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative processes or processes of continuous control, namely feedback, the control of performance by the consequences of the act performed. In the hypothetico-deductive scheme the inferences we draw from a hypothesis are, in a sense, its logical output. If they are true, the hypothesis need not be altered, but correction is obligatory if they are false. The continuous feedback from inference to hypothesis is implicit in Whewell's account of scientific method; he would not have dissented from the view that scientific behaviour can be classified as appropriately under cybernetics as under logic. ~ Peter Medawar

It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences. ~ Peter Medawar

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare. ~ Peter Medawar

There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? ~ Peter Medawar

The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as "How did everything begin?" "What are we all here for?" "What is the point of living? ~ Sir Peter Medawar

To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities. ~ Peter Medawar

Is the scientific paper a fraud? ~ Peter Medawar

It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief. ~ Peter Medawar

Heredity proposes and development disposes. ~ Peter Medawar

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science. ~ Peter Medawar

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. ~ Peter Medawar

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together. ~ Peter Medawar

We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding. ~ Peter Medawar

Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity. ~ Peter Ustinov

For who does not know, or does not advert to the fact, that what was given to the Roman Church by Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and is preserved even to this day, is what should be observed by all? Nor should anything be added, or anything unauthorized be introduced, nor should an exemplar be looked for elsewhere. ~ Pope Innocent I

Garlic bread, it's the future, I've tasted it ~ Peter Kay

You came to lands that were not yours, murdered thousands of men, raped their women, enslaved their children, and think your soul is clean because their holy book's a little different from yours! You keep the demons from them, ay, but chickens on the chopping block don't call the butcher Deliverer for keeping the fox at bay. ~ Peter V. Brett

In the Big Equation we are nothing - Except to each other. ~ Peter Rumens

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket. ~ Peter Thiel

Marriage is forever. It's like cement. ~ Peter O'Toole

Stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. Merrin went calmly up the staircase, a slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister. Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin swiftly exited the room, closed the door, then moved quickly down the hall while behind him the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him with an odd expression on her face. Merrin descended the staircase rapidly and put out his hand to the waiting Karras. ~ William Peter Blatty

Would be to start local. Assuming ~ Peter James

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. ~ Peter Thiel

(Q: From an outsider's perspective, what you call "chaos magick" has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn't seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?)
A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations. ~ Peter J. Carroll

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places. ~ Peter Singer

All men will be Peters in their bragging tongue, and most men will be Peters in their base denial; but few men will be Peters in their quick repentance. ~ Owen Feltham

To be gentle, tolerant, wise and reasonable requires a goodly portion of toughness. ~ Peter Ustinov

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence. ~ Peter Drucker

Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communication. Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers. ~ Peter Drucker

I was a sullen kid who smoked cigarettes and wore black every day, and I went to a school that was lacrosse players and Izods. ~ Peter Dinklage

Life is all about lies. It's about what you can stomach. ~ Peter Tieryas

They amaze me most of those remixes. Some of them are crap. But every time I complain, someone comes up and says they are for a different market that you don't understand. Some of the New Order ones are really great, though. ~ Peter Hook

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old. ~ Peter Straub

The real bubble in China is in US Treasuries, in US dollars ~ Peter Schiff

GGRRROOCCCCK...
Ian's knees buckled. The rock outcropping shook the ground, sending a spew of grayish dust that quickly billowed around them.
Shielding his eyes, he spotted Amy standing by the figurine, which was now moving toward her. She was in shock, her backpack on the ground by her feet.
"Get back!" he shouted.
Ian pulled Amy away and threw her to the ground, landing on top of her. Gravel showered over his back, embedding into his hair and landing on the ground like a burst of applause.
His second though was that the shirt would be ruined. And this was the shock of it-that his first thought had not been about the shirt. Or the coin. Or himself.
It had been about her.
But that was not part of the plan. She existed for a purpose. She was a tactic, a stepping stone. She was...
"Lovely," he said.
Amy was staring up at him, petrified, her eyelashes flecked with dust. Ian took her hand, which was knotted into a fist. "Y-y-you don't have to do that," she whispered.
"Do what?" Ian asked.
"Be sarcastic. Say things like 'lovely.' You saved my life. Th-thank you."
"My duty," he replied. He lowered his head and allowed his lips to brush hers. Just a bit. ~ Peter Lerangis

When Peter sets his mind to a thing," Tanngnost thought, "far be it from reason to stop him. ~ Brom

Your ultimate success or failure will depend on your ability to ignore the worries of the world long enough to allow your investments to succeed. ~ Peter Lynch

The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line. ~ Robert Frost

Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned.

There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths--does that help you? ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade. ~ Peter Lynch

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. ~ David Wallace-Wells

An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

Spidey was the one comic I read consistently throughout my childhood. As someone who grew up a nerd, scrawny, and picked on in high school, I related very strongly to Peter Parker. ~ Josh Keaton

Natural isn't the same as right. Normal isn't the same as moral. Everyone deserves a say in what happens to the world. ~ Audrey Greathouse

Now suppose both death and hell were utterly defeated. Suppose the fight was fixed. Suppose God took you on a crystal ball trip into your future and you saw with indubitable certainty that despite everything - your sin, your smallness, your stupidity - you could have free for the asking your whole crazy heart's deepest desire: heaven, eternal joy. Would you not return fearless and singing? What can earth do to you, if you are guaranteed heaven? To fear the worst earthly loss would be like a millionaire fearing the loss of a penny - less, a scratch on a penny. ~ Peter Kreeft

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? ~ Peter Watts

Money in property is dead money. It doesn't help the country. It's funny how the U.K., Ireland and Spain are the most property-obsessed nations in Europe and yet are also the ones suffering the most. ~ Peter Hargreaves

I just think the less you know about an actor, the more serious you'll take them as an actor because they will disappear a little bit. ~ Peter Dinklage

I identify with the 99 per cent. ~ Peter M. Brant

I didn't set out to make this kind of picture. It just came my way. But its been going on for me for 16 years now and its wonderful for an actor to work consistently. There seems to be an insatiable audience for this type of film. ~ Peter Cushing

The groupies are far more real now than there were then. ~ Peter Tork

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. ~ Peter Watts

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values. ~ Peter Abrahams