Peter Medawar Quotes

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.

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

Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

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

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

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

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.

Science is the art of the solvable.

I regret my disbelief in God.

Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.

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

It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.