Karl Popper Quotes
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Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
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True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
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It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
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In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.
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It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
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Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
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Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.
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Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
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We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
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There are all kinds of sources of our knowledge; but none has authority … The fundamental mistake made by the philosophical theory of the ultimate sources of our knowledge is that it does not distinguish clearly enough between questions of origin and questions of validity.
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Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
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'Natural selection and the emergence of mind' dialectica Vol. 32 (1978), p. 339-355; republished in Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge (1987) edited by Gerard Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley, III
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Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
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Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
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No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
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The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.
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There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.
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All things living are in search of a better world.
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You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy', and the other 'tyranny'.
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If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.
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The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.
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We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.
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There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
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A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.