Top 39 Medawar's Quotes
#1. on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God.
Richard Dawkins
#2. It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.
Peter Medawar
#3. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.
Peter Medawar
#4. An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.
Peter Medawar
#5. The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.
Peter Medawar
#6. No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.
Peter Medawar
#7. I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary ...
Peter Medawar
#8. The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.
Peter Medawar
#9. Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
Peter Medawar
#10. To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Peter Medawar
#11. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
Peter Medawar
#12. The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Peter Medawar
#13. I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.
Peter Medawar
#15. The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
Peter Medawar
#16. All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.
Peter Medawar
#17. Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.
Peter Medawar
#18. I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.
Peter Medawar
#19. Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
Peter Medawar
#20. A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.
Peter Medawar
#21. The bells which toll for mankind are - most of them, anyway - like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.
Peter Medawar
#22. Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.
Peter Medawar
#23. For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Peter Medawar
#24. The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
Peter Medawar
#25. It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.
Peter Medawar
#28. Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.
Peter Medawar
#29. The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.
Peter Medawar
#30. The workroom radio, tuned to FM 88.9, emitted Muddy Waters's throaty warbling. A rez station, WOJB did its best to hit every level of musical taste. Absolute bite-ya-in-the-ass blues was aired only during the wee hours.
Tracker's favorite time and music.
Mardi Oakley Medawar
#31. The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.
Peter Medawar
#32. [A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.
Peter Medawar
#33. When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.
Peter Medawar
#34. Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably underestimated and largely underemployed.
Charles Medawar
#36. If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.
Peter Medawar
#37. Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.
David Quammen
#38. 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.
Peter Medawar
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