“Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling i...” — Ian Hacking Quote

“Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.”

“Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.”

“The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull.”

“Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.”

“Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications.”

“I did not come to NASA to make history.”

“We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.”

“Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.”

“The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.”

“History never looks like history when you are living through it.”

“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”