Peter Medawar Quotes

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Let us gather facts in order to get ourselves thinking.

Believing isn't thinking, but we've been programmed to believe that believing is thinking. To use our intelligence to think means we're keeping the energy active, we're thinking, we're really using the power of our intelligence in a thinking way. But when we've been programmed to believe, we're no longer thinking, because energy flows.

No matter how close thought sticks to the actual, it follows its own rules.

Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.

Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

Riposte of "that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical," Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

Analysis and synthesis are both as necessary to the thinking spirit as inspiration and expiration to the organism.

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?