Ernst Mayr Quotes

The only hope [of science] ... is in genuine induction.

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

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

I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

Our society has lost confidence in the power of reason, except perhaps scientific reason.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.

Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

Where do we stand today compared to Greece circa 400 B.C.? Today's experiment-driven 'standard model' is not all that dissimilar to Democritus's speculative [sic] atomic theory.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.

What science is all about is a process. It's like saying, "Well, is it important for people to know that World War II happened?" Well it's part of what makes us who we are. And so, there's basic bits of science we need to know.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.