The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.