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To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

Peter Medawar

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Peter Medawar
Age: 72 †
Born: 1915
Born: February 28
Died: 1987
Died: October 2
Autobiographer
Biologist
Immunologist
Physician
Physiologist
Professor
Writer
Zoologist
Rio
P.B. Medawar
P. B. Medawar
Sir Peter Medawar
Lasts
Last
Deride
Hope
Meanness
Science
Anticipation
Spirit
Ultimate
Mind
Poverty
Progress
Word

More quotes by Peter Medawar

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Heredity proposes and development disposes.
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[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.
Peter Medawar
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The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
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The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.
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An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.
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Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.
Peter Medawar
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The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?
Peter Medawar
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A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.
Peter Medawar
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Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.
Peter Medawar
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Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
Peter Medawar
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The bells which toll for mankind are - most of them, anyway - like the bells of Alpine cattle they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.
Peter Medawar
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To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Peter Medawar
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I regret my disbelief in God.
Peter Medawar
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The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.
Peter Medawar
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In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.
Peter Medawar
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Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.
Peter Medawar
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Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?
Peter Medawar
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I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined here, to expound is to expose.
Peter Medawar
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Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
Peter Medawar
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It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.
Peter Medawar