
“My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind.”
Who's Who in America (1991)
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Paul Karl Feyerabend 81
Austrian-born philosopher of science 1924–1994Related quotes


“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
As quoted without citation in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24
Attributed
Intellectual Freedom (1971)

Preface to the First Edition
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Context: If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.

Quoted in "Architect of Optimism," Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (2007-04-13).

Interview, Fabian Paffendorf, wicked-vision.com, November, 2003, 2007-09-30 http://www.wicked-vision.com/artikel/thorne/e_interview.php,
( also available in German http://www.wicked-vision.com/artikel/thorne/d_interview.php).

Sourced to the book, The Ascent of Man (1973), BBC Books: London, Chapter 13: The Long Childhood, p. 330.
The Ascent of Man (1973)
Context: We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.