“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

— William James

"The Will to Believe" p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA10
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

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William James 246

American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist 1842–1910

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“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

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William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)
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“When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

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“The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch. 9, p. 234 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=252

“All mankind rules its women, and we rule all mankind, but our women rule us.”

Cato the Elder (-234–-149 BC) politician, writer and economist (0234-0149)

In bitter criticism of the prevalent domination of women (The Classical weekly, Vol. 25–26, 1932, p. 273).
Quoted in Plutarch Apophthegmata regum et imperatorum, in Greek.

“A theory, is a body of knowledge, that is supportive of, and explanative of facts. Scientific laws are included within a theory, facts are included within a theory, that's why you have the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity. There is no concept in creationism, which meets any of the qualifications of a scientific theory, none. You have no facts, you have no laws, you have no evidence, you have no explanative power. All you have, is whatever science can't explain, you pretend you can.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Reason Rally Ra Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isrST6wOUJA (March 28, 2012)

“There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory… why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?”

Alasdair MacIntyre book After Virtue

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 113.

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”

Werner Heisenberg book The Part and The Whole

Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann.
Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) http://www.zeit.de/1969/34/kein-chaos-aus-dem-nicht-wieder-ordnung-wuerde/komplettansicht; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)

“The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact …that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

The New York Times (1960), as cited in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio, p. 156

“The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. Different members of the theory run together, and we have thus a constant convergence to unity. In false theories, the contrary is the case.”

William Whewell (1794–1866) English philosopher & historian of science

Part 2, Book 11, ch. 5, sect. 3, art. 12.
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

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William James 246

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