... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.

To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.

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.

I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.

But ... the working scientist ... is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. ... No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow.

By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge.