We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is [as] admirable and sound as it is dangerous – from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

[To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do.

In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding. If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

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.