
Minnesota declaration (1999)
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), chapter 5.
Context: A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications.... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
Minnesota declaration (1999)
“Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth”
Source: Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1938), p. 291
Context: Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity.
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
Source: 1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
Source: Industrial Organization: Theory and practice, 1965, p. 24