The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.