Oscar Wilde Quotes

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.

The people who have sufficient passion for the truth to give the truth a chance to prevail, if it runs counter to their bias, are in a minority. How important is this "minority?" It is difficult to say at this point, for, at the present time their influence on governmental decisions is not perceptible.

I don’t attack people. I attack ideas. And some very good people can have some very bad ideas.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat. They do not try to persuade at any cost. They appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority ...

Be careful of hubris about ideas—especially your own. Remember always, that there is one commonality between all the good ideas that were ever created and all the bad ideas: The people you created them thought that they were good ideas.

Being unbiased is a lot like being humble: as soon as you think you are, you aren’t. Neither are a finite state of being but a continuous struggle to not allow our perspectives poison our opinions.

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

I like groaning. That means that you're not pandering to their already settled prejudices.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score.... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'

The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It's powerful because it's so rare.

Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.

Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.

There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis , because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.

Do not be influenced by the importance of the writer, and whether his learning be great or small, but let the love of pure truth draw you to read. Do not inquire, Who said this? but pay attention to what is said.

Anybody who French bashes just might as well wear a badge that says 'I am a follower! I don't think for myself and I have no idea what I'm talking about.' That would be a French basher.

I want to make a summing up, brief and to the point, but thorough. I have never suppressed a word in my books out of regard for other people and their prejudices.

In forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions; else, whatsoever is done or said, will be measured by a wrong rule; like them who have jaundice, to whom everything appears yellow.

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.