Top 40 Peter Medawar Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?”

— Peter Medawar

2. “There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.”

— Peter Medawar

3. “Science is the art of the solvable.”

— Peter Medawar

4. “If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.”

— Peter Medawar

5. “Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.”

— Peter Medawar

6. “It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.”

— Peter Medawar

7. “The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.”

— Peter Medawar

8. “The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”

— Peter Medawar

9. “Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.”

— Peter Medawar

10. “Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.”

— Peter Medawar

11. “An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

— Peter Medawar

12. “Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.”

— Peter Medawar

13. “For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.”

— Peter Medawar

14. “To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.”

— Peter Medawar

15. “The bells which toll for mankind are – most of them, anyway – like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.”

— Peter Medawar

16. “Heredity proposes and development disposes.”

— Peter Medawar

17. “Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.”

— Peter Medawar

18. “I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.”

— Peter Medawar

19. “If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.”

— Peter Medawar

20. “The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs – for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?”

— Peter Medawar

21. “I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.”

— Peter Medawar

22. “Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.”

— Peter Medawar

23. “I regret my disbelief in God.”

— Peter Medawar

24. “The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.”

— Peter Medawar

25. “To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.”

— Peter Medawar

26. “Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.”

— Peter Medawar

27. “French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”

— Peter Medawar

28. “A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.”

— Peter Medawar

29. “The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.”

— Peter Medawar

30. “People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. – Peter Medawar.”

— Peter Medawar

31. “When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.”

— Peter Medawar

32. “All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.”

— Peter Medawar

33. “There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare – particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for – that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.”

— Peter Medawar

34. “The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.”

— Peter Medawar

35. “I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.”

— Peter Medawar

36. “I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary...”

— Peter Medawar

37. “Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.”

— Peter Medawar

38. “A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.”

— Peter Medawar

39. “There is no certain way of telling in advance if the day- dreams of a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth will carry a novice through the frustration of seeing experiments fail and of making the dismaying discovery that some of one’s favorite ideas are groundless.”

— Peter Medawar

40. “In choosing topics for research and departments to enlist in, a young scientist must beware of following fashion. It is one thing to fall into step with a great concerted movement of thought such as molecular genetics or cellular immunology, but quite another merely to fall in with prevailing fashion for, say, some new histochemical procedure or technical gimmick.”

— Peter Medawar

41. “In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only ‘intended’ to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.”

— Peter Medawar

42. “It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.”

— Peter Medawar

43. “The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.”

— Peter Medawar

44. “There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common?”

— Peter Medawar

45. “It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.”

— Peter Medawar

46. “Is common failing... To fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A Love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.”

— Peter Medawar