Peter Medawar - The limits of science (1984)

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I do not believe—indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe—that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary...

Peter Medawar
Science can only proceed on a basis of confidence, so that scientists do not suspect each other of dishonesty or sharp practice, and believe each other unless there is very good reason to do otherwise.

Peter Medawar
What is research but learning - and what scientist ever feels that, being complete, his research is now at last finished? The nature of science is such that a scientist goes on learning all his life - and must - and exults in the obligation upon him to do so.

Peter Medawar
Science will persevere just as long as we retain a faculty we show no signs of losing: the ability to conceive — in no matter how imperfect or rudimentary a form — what the truth might be and retain also the inclination to ascertain whether our imaginings correspond to real life or not.

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
The most heinous offense a scientist as a scientist can commit is to declare to be true that which is not so; if a scientist cannot interpret the phenomenon he is studying, it is a binding obligation upon him to make it possible for another to do so.

Peter Medawar
Philosophers and logicians since the days of Bacon have been entirely clear on this point: deduction merely makes explicit information that is already there. It is not a procedure by which new information can be brought into being.

Peter Medawar