Category: Thought

One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

C.S. Peirce, “Pragmatism and Pragmaticism” (1903).

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler, Speech at the Somerville Club, February 27, 1895.

The moral responsibility of the American humorist is the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, and the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence. Thus, the humorist is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and is the natural friend of human rights and liberties.

Mark Twain, quoted in Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull, 120.

The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor but also the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, September 6, 2013, at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas.

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

Charles Sanders Peirce, Lectures on Pragmatism delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (March 26 – May 17, 1903).

A thing must either exist or not exist — must have a certain attribute or not have it: there is no third possibility. This is a postulate of all thought; and in so far as it is alleged of phenomenal existence, no one calls it in question.

Herbert Spencer, ”Mill versus Hamilton — The Test of Truth,” The Fortnightly Review (July 1865).

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men.

Charles Sanders Peirce, The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited with an introducton by Justus Buchler, p. 49.

A theory that does not work well in practice is a bad theory. The way to tell whether a theory is good or bad is to test it by practice. Everything that is done at all, unless by mere chance, is done on some theory; and it is certainly better that things should be done on a good theory than on a bad one. What makes a theory good? Simply because it corresponds with and explains the facts.

Arthur Latham Perry, Elements of Political Economy (1869).

Agreement is comparatively unimportant in the search for truth: we may easily both be mistaken. People did strongly agree, for a very long time, on many erroneous doctrines (such as the Ptolemaic system of the world); and agreement is often the result of the fear of intolerance, or even of violence.

Karl Popper, “Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility,” in Susan Mendus and David Edwards (editors), On Toleration, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 17–34.