#v

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#after #another #arrogance #centrality #common

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#apples #assent #classrooms #confirmed #degree

There was a second problem that was still not a technical problem... the project became classified. I couldn't work on it after having gone to all that trouble. I was considered a security risk, so I could not get a clearance. ↗

— Gordon Gould

#became #classified #clearance #considered #could

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#deeper #denial #even #extensive #falsely

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#capable #complexity #construction #creature #drive

Deep inside us, we know what every family therapist knows: the problems between the parents become the problems within the children. ↗

— Roger Gould

#between #children #deep #deep inside #every

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#charge #claim #creationist #critics #evolution

Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one. ↗

— Baltasar Gracian

#always #amended #little #never #said

I love you, Godric St. John, and now I'm breaking my word. I will not leave you. You may either come with me to Laurelwood or I'll stay here with you in your musty old house in London and drive you mad with all my talking and relatives and... and exotic sexual positions until you break down and love me back, for I'm warning you that I'm not giving up until you love me and we're a happy family with dozens of children. ↗

— Elizabeth Hoyt

#love #megs #family

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#because #bitter #did #died #fact