Peter Medawar Quotes

“An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

“Heredity proposes and development disposes.”

“If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.”

“People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

“Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.”

“Science is the art of the solvable.”

“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.”

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

“The bells which toll for mankind are – most of them, anyway – like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.”

“The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.”