Peter Medawar Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Peter Medawar Quotes
Like all good memoirs it has not been emasculated by considerations of good taste.

Peter Medawar
Money can't buy ideas, that's for sure, but lack of it can prevent one having them.

Peter Medawar
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it.

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

Peter Medawar
The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false.

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

Peter Medawar
Before a good scientist tries to persuade others that he is on to something good, he must first convince himself.

Peter Medawar
The formulation of a hypothesis carries with it an obligation to test it as rigorously as we can command skills to do so.

Peter Medawar
One can envisage an end of science no more readily than one can envisage an end of imaginative literature or the fine arts.

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

Peter Medawar
Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.

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

Peter Medawar
In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man.

Peter Medawar
A bishop wrote gravely to the Times inviting all nations to destroy 'the formula' of the atomic bomb. There is no simple remedy for ignorance so abysmal.

Peter Medawar
It is fortunate for human beings that no Geneva convention forbids the prosecution of germ warfare by germs themselves; if it did, there would be no antibiotics.

Peter Medawar
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.

Peter Medawar
All experimentation is criticism. If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all.

Peter Medawar
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.

Peter Medawar
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.

Peter Medawar
Mathematicians are reputed to be rare and special people, exulting in the exercise of a gift far beyond the performance, and perhaps even the conception, of ordinary people.

Peter Medawar
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.

Peter Medawar
The similarity between them is not the taxonomic key to some other, deeper, affinity, and our recognizing its existence marks the end, not the inauguration, of a train of thought.

Peter Medawar
Scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. Embarrassing questions tend to remain unasked or, if asked, to be asked rudely.

Peter Medawar
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem able to get on very well without it.

Peter Medawar
To say that Einstein formulated a theory of relativity by guesswork is on all fours with saying that Wordsworth wrote rhymes and Mozart tuneful music. It is cheeky where something grave is called for.

Peter Medawar