“A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.”

— Carl Sagan

Source: Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997), Chapter 14, "The Common Enemy".

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Carl Sagan 365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

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“The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

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“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

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“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

As quoted in "J. Robert Oppenheimer" by L. Barnett, in Life, Vol. 7, No. 9, International Edition (24 October 1949), p. 58; sometimes a partial version (the final sentence) is misattributed to Marcel Proust.
Context: There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

“From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice, to drop the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then, was not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an organic whole or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“To be simple is to accept the essence of the message and not try to twist it or adapt it to our own ideas. To be simple we must desire to remain in the image of God. We must not be so complex that we make God into our image! Simplicity is dying to self, an emptying.”

Catherine Doherty (1896–1985) Religious order founder; Servant of God

"For This I Have Laid Down My Life", p. 12
Unfinished Pilgrimage (1995)

“The lessons of the most traumatic past must be learned and continually relearned, not only to prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself, but also to honor, as one nation, those who made our freedom possible, and to remember that freedom is certainly never free”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

Context: For many South Koreans today, the Korean War is little more than a tragedy of the past or a tale in abstraction. For others, it is a trauma best forgotten. But on Memorial Day, the South Koreans, as a nation, must not forget the suffering and sacrifice in their national historical experience. The lessons of the most traumatic past must be learned and continually relearned, not only to prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself, but also to honor, as one nation, those who made our freedom possible, and to remember that freedom is certainly never free.

“If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena… Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities.
…No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis

Science and Hypothesis (1901)

“We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it.”

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) American political economist

Elinor Ostrom (2009) "Nobel Prize Lecture", December 8.

“There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 333

“The more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need https://books.google.com/books?id=W3MuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=The+more+complex+our+economy,+the+more+we+should+rely+on+the+miraculous,+self-adapting+processes+of+men+acting+freely.+No+mind+of+man+nor+any+combination+of+minds+can+even+envision,+let+alone+intelligently+control,+the+countless+human+energy+exchanges+in+a+simple+society,+to+say+nothing+of+a+complex+one.&source=bl&ots=OZxiANz5bm&sig=QP-xiNhoDNxDDMB1mcR25NuqEl4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiq04eE9_LTAhVMKyYKHWh_BGEQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=The%20more%20complex%20our%20economy%2C%20the%20more%20we%20should%20rely%20on%20the%20miraculous%2C%20self-adapting%20processes%20of%20men%20acting%20freely.%20No%20mind%20of%20man%20nor%20any%20combination%20of%20minds%20can%20even%20envision%2C%20let%20alone%20intelligently%20control%2C%20the%20countless%20human%20energy%20exchanges%20in%20a%20simple%20society%2C%20to%20say%20nothing%20of%20a%20complex%20one.&f=false
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

“A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.”

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Carl Sagan 365

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