A Quote by Charles Darwin

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Charles Darwin

Quote Topics

Science Endure Every Evidence Facts False Falseness Harm Highly Little Long Often Pleasure Progress Proving Some Supported Takes Views

Quote Author

Charles Darwin
English - Scientist
February 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882

I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.

Lawrence M. Krauss

It surely can be no offence to state, that the progress of science has led to new views, and that the consequences that can be deduced from the knowledge of a hundred facts may be very different from those deducible from five. It is also possible that the facts first known may be the exceptions to a rule and not the rule itself, and generalisations from these first-known facts, though useful at the time, may be highly mischievous, and impede the progress of the science if retained when it has made some advance.

Henry De la Beche

Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper.

Lawrence M. Krauss

The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.

Thomas Malthus

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

Carl Sagan

As you look at your fears head-on, you'll begin to see how much of what you fear is just False Evidence Appearing Real. When you act on this false evidence, you create chaos in your life.

Gabrielle Bernstein

'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.

Stephen Jay Gould

To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.

Herbert Marcuse

It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Printers shall be liable to legal prosecution for printing and publishing false facts injurious to the party prosecuting: but they shall be under no other restraint.

Thomas Jefferson

The whole entire existence of the pharmaceutical industry is based on presentation of false science, and advertising this false science and drumming it into the minds of gullible people who have no curiosity to find out why that is so.

Fereydoon Batmanghelidj

Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage-good teaching-than a bill forcing our honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?.

Stephen Jay Gould

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

George Santayana

There is a false modesty, which is vanity; a false glory, which is levity; a false grandeur, which is meanness; a false virtue, which is hypocrisy, and a false wisdom, which is prudery.

Jean de la Bruyere

If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.

Thomas Jefferson

In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.