If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them.

The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

My thesis is that what we call 'science' is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition-that of critically discussing the myth. ... In a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.