Imre Lakatos Quotes

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

It would be superfluous to receive by faith, things that can be known by natural reason

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Science is not wisdom.

Philosophy is the true mother of science.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

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.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes.

Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

POSITIVISM- A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which 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.