The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens.

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.

The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting, that together constitute understanding, are done by me and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead.

The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.

It seems to me that there is a good deal of ballyhoo about scientific method. I venture to think that the people who talk most about it are the people who do least about it. Scientific method is what working scientists do, not what other people or even they themselves may say about it. No working scientist, when he plans an experiment in the laboratory, asks himself whether he is being properly scientific, nor is he interested in whatever method he may be using as method.

The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private.