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The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them for then it must sink back into savagery.

William Kingdon Clifford

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William Kingdon Clifford
Age: 33 †
Born: 1845
Born: May 4
Died: 1879
Died: March 3
Mathematician
Philosopher
University Teacher
W. K. Clifford
Things
Wrong
Sink
Society
Testing
Become
Merely
Back
Habit
Enough
Danger
Must
Lose
Credulous
Great
Loses
Inquiring
Believe
Though
Savagery

More quotes by William Kingdon Clifford

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Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
William Kingdon Clifford
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If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.
William Kingdon Clifford
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All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.
William Kingdon Clifford
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scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
William Kingdon Clifford
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He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.
William Kingdon Clifford
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An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.
William Kingdon Clifford
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A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.
William Kingdon Clifford
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The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.
William Kingdon Clifford
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There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
William Kingdon Clifford
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No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
William Kingdon Clifford
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When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.
William Kingdon Clifford
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The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.
William Kingdon Clifford
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This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
William Kingdon Clifford
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If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.
William Kingdon Clifford
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We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
William Kingdon Clifford
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We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.
William Kingdon Clifford
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There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes.
William Kingdon Clifford