People From Vancouver

"Inferences and large dosages of imagination actually have allowed the construction of a far more adequate understanding of the cosmic and human past than earlier generations achieved. I believe that this is the central intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century. Innumerable cosmologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ecologists, ethologists, and other specialists have played their part; a few swashbuckling intellects led the way, and the outlines of an evolutionary worldview, uniting natural and human history, has begun to emerge. It may be convincing for generations to come—or again may not."

"I departed from parental paths significantly and abruptly one Sunday morning when, sitting in the family pew of the Hyde Park United Church and idly twisting a loose button on the cushion beside me, I said to myself, "I do not believe in God." Some months previously... when our minister fell back on St. Anselm's ontological argument to prove the existence of God, he entirely failed to convince me. Quite the contrary, the argument struck me as an abuse of language. Though I duly submitted to the ritual of confirmation... Horton's unconvincing argument had sown doubt in my mind; and for that reason I can assign, on that morning, listening to his more emotional, hortatory rhetoric... the balance tipped, committing me to a secret, personal rejection of the Christian piety my parents held dear."

"In 1933-34, I took a full-blown college course on the University of Chicago campus. This was part of an experiment by President Hutchins to see whether combining the last two years of high school with the first two years of college might make a more rigorous curriculum possible for what he called "General Education." This he hoped might provide a rational, philosophical guide to adult life and citizenship, replacing the vanished religious certainties he had grown up to reject—and regret."

"I came away from the two science surveys superficially acquainted with what was already a rather old-fashioned version of contemporary natural science. Relativity and quantum mechanics were mentioned... but not explained; the stars were still eternal; and both subatomic particles and biochemistry were discreetly omitted. ...The two courses persuaded me that, in some sense, I understood the natural world. The illusion endured, for later in life... I tagged along by reading popular accounts, believing that the natural world out there was somehow within my reach, even without the mathematics that made quantum mechanics so mysteriously plausible."

"John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct...What struck me... was the related idea that human thought is a reaction to frustrated habit— what people often do when the outcome of their action disappoints their expectation. I concluded that unthinking, habitual action is the natural and truly happy way of life; whereas thought is a symptom of dysfunction but conducive to survival all the same since, every so often, new thoughts find ways of escaping the frustration that provoked them by inventing satisfying new ways to get things done."

"Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas."

"The single most important stimulus to my thought came by chance when I took a course from Robert Redfield entitled "Folk Society." …His approach was to set up antithetical ideal types, expecting to locate any actual human community somewhere along the spectrum of opposites his fieldwork had suggested to him. ...But in 1936 his typology had no time dimension. I was so strongly attracted to his scheme that it is scarcely an exaggeration to describe my subsequent intellectual effort as an attempt to explore the missing time dimension of social change as Redfield envisaged it, not in Yucatan but around the whole earth and across recorded time."

"An irresistible cycle seemed to operate, repeating patterns of the ancient world where civil strife and war brought disaster... I surmised that patterned and predictable changes were in turn rooted in the very nature of civilization—the ineluctable breaker of custom and eroder of moral codes, and itself a product and expression of rapid technological and social change."

"To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough."

"We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create."

"From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas."

"Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance."

"When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are."

"Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state."

"Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory."

"A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'."

"Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!"

"Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it."

"Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology."

"Pascal is called the founder of modern probability theory. He earns this title not only for the familiar correspondence with Fermat on games of chance, but also for his conception of decision theory, and because he was an instrument in the demolition of probabilism, a doctrine which would have precluded rational probability theory."

"There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside."

"Well, he wasn't a relativist. There's a long and complicated story of the rise of a desire for scientific relativism. Part of it may well be simply sort of rage against reason, the fear of the sciences and a kind of total dislike of the arrogance of a great many scientists who say we're finding out the truth about everything—and here [with Kuhn] there was a way to undermine that arrogance."

"Notice that there is no sociology in the book. Scientific communities and their practices are, however, at its core, entering with paradigms, as we saw, at page 10 and continuing to the final page of the book. There had been sociology of scientific knowledge before Kuhn, but after Structure it burgeoned, leading to what is now called science studies. This is a self-generating field (with, of course, its own journals and societies) that includes some work in the history and the philosophy of sciences and technology, but whose emphasis is on sociological approaches of various kinds, some observational, some theoretical. Much, and perhaps most, of the really original thinking about the sciences after Kuhn has had a sociological bent. Kuhn was hostile to these developments. In the opinion of many younger workers, that is regrettable. Let us put it down to dissatisfaction with growing pains of the field, rather than venturing into tedious metaphors about fathers and sons. One of Kuhn’s marvelous legacies is science studies as we know it today."

"Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. [...] Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world.[...] In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers. It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work..."

"There's a deep thirst and hunger to know more about space, literally because of the Star Trek phenomenon."

"To be an effective leader you have to be a good listener -- listening even to those who disagree with you -- and a good communicator; you have to be persuasive."

"I love working in the space program on one-of-a-kind engineering applications, like flying spacecraft, which is really a team effort. There are so many aspects of keeping a piece of engineering working and operating when it's thousands of kilometers away from you. The ingenuity required is amazing."

"…you go home and maybe on the evening news you see something that reminds you that you're exploring space. Something that reminds me that I am one of a four-hundred member squad that is flying a spacecraft, exploring the solar system. Every once in a while you step back and you see that this is really amazing."

"We want to find [life]. Absolutely. And even now it's really disappointing when you think that, if there is extraterrestrial life, it’s probably bacteria and microbial life. Because you want Star Wars. I want to meet Spock. I think that, as intellectual beings, we fantasize about meeting other intellects similar to our own. It's just a basic human desire."

"Bishops are not intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression. The recent irregular ordination in Singapore is, in my opinion, an open and premeditated assault on Anglican tradition, catholic order and Christian charity. I ask for the prayers of the whole church for the Primates' Meeting that it may contribute to deeper comprehension, mutual trust, and godly quietness among its members and throughout the Communion."

"Occupational incompetence is everywhere. Have you noticed it? Probably we all have noticed it."

"Dr. Peter effectively destroys examples of seeming exceptions and is rather convincing that his principle is ubiquitous."

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."

"When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation."

"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?"

"Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object."

"The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time."

"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

"On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman."

"The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively."

"Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence"

"Never stand when you can sit; never walk when you can ride; never Push when you can Pull."

"Some Blockett-type employees actually believe that they have received a genuine promotion; others recognize the truth. But the main function of a pseudo-promotion is to deceive people outside the hierarchy. When this is achieved, the maneuver is counted a success."

"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Do not be fooled by apparent exceptions."

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

"In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level."