Peter Medawar Quotes

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete

Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact.

I still am amazed by the reaction I get from people when I tell them that there was zero immigration in this country from 1924 to 1965. And the reason that people don't know that, A, they just don't know it, it's not reported, it's never been part of history class, history education.

Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.

Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.

It is impossible for a Die, with such determined force and direction which makes it fall on such a determined side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such a determin'd side, and therefore I call that Chance, which is nothing, but want of Art.

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

You didn't understand or care to know, you get your education from your lovers.

If you asked a sample of Americans "What is the temperature of Mars?" about 8% would say they don't know.

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

So while it seemed like you were seeing everything, you really weren't. Just bits and pieces that looked like a whole.

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind

The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions