Massimo Pigliucci Quotes

#1. If a theory purports to explain everything, then it is likely not explaining much at all.

Massimo Pigliucci

#2. Richard Dawkins lamented,9 we think that our kids need to have "fun, fun, fun" rather than, say, experience wonder or interest (they are not the same thing) when going to school or a museum.

Massimo Pigliucci

#3. As astronomer Carl Sagan once aptly put it, you do not want to keep your mind so open that your brain is likely to fall out.

Massimo Pigliucci

#4. British astronomer royal Richard Woolley, who in 1956 said, "All this talk about space travel is utter bilge, really."10 Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth just five years later.

Massimo Pigliucci

#5. One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry. Another

Massimo Pigliucci

#6. It is because one can build a compelling set of arguments - informed by science and thoroughly compatible with it - that to believe in anything despite the complete lack of evidence is, in fact, irrational.

Massimo Pigliucci

#7. Science progresses. Ideology tends to linger unchanged, and often unquestioned.

Massimo Pigliucci

#8. [T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.

Massimo Pigliucci

#9. [T]he downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.

Massimo Pigliucci

#10. Following the Post Modernist route, we may indeed never arrive at meaning, but not because meaning is not there ... only because we are lost in endless linguistic games that are entirely beside the point.

Massimo Pigliucci