What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

Science is perhaps the only human activity in which errors are systematically criticized and, in time, corrected.

I have spoken to Einstein and he admitted to me that his theory was in fact no different from the one of Parmenides.

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