People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.
Gordon AllportRead
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Scientific inquiry generates questions rather than definitive answers, reflecting our intellectual growth.
This quote by Gordon Allport emphasizes that the essence of scientific pursuit is the continual generation of questions, rather than the accumulation of answers. Intellectual maturity, according to the philosopher mentioned, is characterized by an increasing dissatisfaction with simplistic answers to complex problems, prompting deeper exploration and a relentless search for understanding.
Themes
Scientific InquiryQuestionsIntellectual MaturityAnswersPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a science conference could use this quote to illustrate the importance of curiosity in research.
More from Gordon Allport
All quotes →Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
Gordon AllportRead
Similar quotes
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
Alan SternRead
In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can't fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that's just part of the structure.
Barry BarishRead
Put glibly:_x000D_ _x000D_ In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it._x000D_ _x000D_ Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state.
Richard HammingRead
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
Isaac AsimovRead
It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
Eugene WignerRead
If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.
Peter SingerRead