- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
- “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”
- “Permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure.”
- “Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is it reasonable?‘”
- “There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science (junk science) … It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.”
- “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it.”
- “Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.”
- “If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming ‘This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!’ we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination.”
- “We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasised, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields.”
- “Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It’s like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.”
- “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
- “The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.”
- “The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be.”
- “And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it.”
- “The exception tests the rule.”
- “That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.”
— Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, scientist, teacher, raconteur and drummer
See Also: First Principles Thinking