The Value of Science (1955)
Context: The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
“Beyond the war years the grim and tortured struggle of Negroes to win their own freedom is an epic of battle against frightful odds. If we have failed to do enough, it was not the will for freedom that was weak, but the forces against us which were too strong.”
1960s, Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address (1962)
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Martin Luther King, Jr. 658
American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Ci… 1929–1968Related quotes
[Introduction à l'histoire universelle, Michelet, Jules, Hachette, 1843, 9]
Introduction to Universal History , 1831, 1831
1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
pg 71
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body
Address to the United States Congress (13 November 1945), quoted in The Times (14 November 1945), p. 4. Aneurin Bevan said to Attlee afterwards: "That was a noble speech. I felt very proud", quoted in John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 187.
1940s
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJodTuDeoYg