Man’s society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.
Philip K. Dick, “The Variable Man” (1952), The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, v.1: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1987).
There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.
Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1864).
And the schools repeated, too, the one great lesson that humanity had genuinely learned. That the secret of peace is freedom, and the secret of freedom is to be able to move away from people with whom you do not agree.
Murray Leinster, The Forgotten Planet (1954).
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.
Karl Popper, “Utopia and Violence,” an address to Institut des Arts in Brussels, Belgium (1947), published in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963).
Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.
We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Vol. 2, Ch. 21 “An Evaluation of the Prophecy.”
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1948).
Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state.
When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative — subject only to the laws which uniformly apply to all of them — we have a system of spontaneous order in society.
Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (1951).
Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge.
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975).