Adam Osborne Quotes

Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.

The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.

The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.

My colleagues have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?

I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

You have to be open-minded, and you have to be critical, and you have to let go of your predispositions about what you've been told that doesn't have foundations in evidence.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa.

I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!'

Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.

Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts, but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.