Karl Popper Quotes

• No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.

  Karl Popper

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• For this, indeed, is the true source of our ignorance-the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

  Karl Popper

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• Science starts only with problems.

  Karl Popper

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• What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach.

  Karl Popper

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• Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem.

  Karl Popper

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• The belief that we can start with pure observations alone, without anything in the nature of a theory, is absurd.

  Karl Popper

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• We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

  Karl Popper

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• It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.

  Karl Popper

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• In order that a new theory should constitute a discovery or step forward it should conflict with its predecessor…it should contradict its predecessor; it should overthrow it. In this sense, progress in science-or at least striking progress-is always revolutionary.

  Karl Popper

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• Every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.

  Karl Popper

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• It must be possible for an empirical system to be refuted by experience.

  Karl Popper

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• Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

  Karl Popper

  Topics in Wisdom

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• Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

  Karl Popper

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• No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

  Karl Popper

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• We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.

  Karl Popper

• We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

  Karl Popper

• Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

  Karl Popper

• There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

  Karl Popper

• Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

  Karl Popper

• Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

  Karl Popper

Karl Popper (24)

Birth:	28th July, 1902
Death:	17th September, 1994
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Philosopher

About

Karl Raimund Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favour of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.

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Births

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• 1989 - Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte
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• 1870 - Alexander Berkman
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Deaths

• 1959 - Max Baer
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay
• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
• 1958 - Mel Ott
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke