Best of Rationality Quotes
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
-Thomas Carlyle
Q: How much does the smoke weight?
A: Subtract from the weight of the wood that was burned the weight of the ashes that remain, and you will have the weight of the smoke.
--Immanuel Kant
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
— Richard Feynman
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
- Dan Barker
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
--Voltaire
There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.
-Louis Aragon
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
- If I understand it, I can build it.
Richard Feynman's inverted (not A implies not B == B implies A) quote.
The new man of science must not think that the "inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden." Nature must be ... put "in constraint" and "moulded" by the mechanical arts. The "searchers and spies of nature" are to discover "her" plots and secrets.
- Francis Bacon
Q: Don't you think sire, that the TV commercials should look more like real life?
A: On the contrary! I think life should be more like TV commercials.
- Benny Hill
Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.
-William Easterly
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The stranger is a theologian.