Robertson Davies Quotes

I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

The great tragedy of Science --- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact

The practice of physic [Medicine] is jostled by quacks on the one side, and by science on the other.

It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

Thus with every advance in our scientific knowledge new elements come up, often forcing us to recast our entire picture of physical reality. No doubt, theorists would much prefer to perfect and amend their theories rather than be obliged to scrap them continually. But this obligation is the condition and price of all scientific progress.

REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE.

We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

To the scientist, failure to flip-flop in the face of contradictory evidence is irrational and dangerous behavior. And scientists will often flip-flop at almost light speed. Often it takes only a single observation to flip-flop thousands of scientifically learned people.

My mom and brother are both doctors, and it seems crazy that so many people think science is a mutable idea.

Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.

Scientific Progress goes boink?

This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? ... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

My father was a doctor so I was around death all my life. So, I was very used to it because he was a f-king doctor.

Science is uncertain.

It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before science came.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.