A Quote by George Sarton

Men of science have made abundant mistakes of every kind; their knowledge has improved only because of their gradual abandonment of ancient errors, poor approximations, and premature conclusions.

George Sarton

Quote Topics

Abandonment Abundant Ancient Because Conclusions Errors Every Gradual Improved Kind Knowledge Made Men Mistakes Only Poor Premature Science

Quote Author

George Sarton
American - Historian
August 31, 1884 - March 22, 1956

It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.

Gary A. Klein

Change the attitude toward errors. Think of an object's user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.

Donald A. Norman

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

Carl Eckart

Every person on earth learns it’s lesson by making different mistakes. The only source of knowledge is experience. Experience avoiding the mistakes you already made.

Valentina

When we don't win, we have to draw conclusions and assess our mistakes. Things can always be improved.

Sergio Ramos

The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.

William Wickenden

The ancient bitter opposition to improved methods [of production] on the ancient theory that it more than temporarily deprives men of employment... has no place in the gospel of American progress.

Herbert Hoover

There are no mistakes, there are only correctable errors. There are no errors, there are only alternate programs.

John C. Lilly

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Auguste Comte

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

Steve Berry

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

Sigmund Freud

In less than eight years "The Origin of Species" has produced conviction in the minds of a majority of the most eminent living men of science. New facts, new problems, new difficulties as they arise are accepted, solved, or removed by this theory; and its principles are illustrated by the progress and conclusions of every well established branch of human knowledge.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.