A Quote by Richard P. Feynman

Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion

Richard P. Feynman

Quote Topics

Expert Opinion Organized Reliability Science Skepticism

Quote Author

Richard P. Feynman
American - Physicist
May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988

The implication was that if you had any skepticism whatsoever, you were anti-science. I think there's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry.

Marianne Williamson

Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.

Michael Shermer

(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)

Garrett Hardin

Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.

Leonard Susskind

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Football is four 15-minute quarters. Plus timeouts and commercials.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

while the executive should give every possible value to the information of the specialist, no executive should abdicate thinking on any subject because of the expert. The expert's information or opinion should not be allowed automatically to become a decision. On the other hand, full recognition should be given to the part the expert plays in decision making.

Mary Parker Follett

The knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the knowledge of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is objective - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined... and fed into a process, now called decision-making. This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.

Ivan Illich

I am not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I probably know more than anyone else in the West, but that doesn't actually mean I am an expert.

Ken Liu

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

Eric S. Raymond

Reliability engineers often assume that reliability and safety are synonymous, but this assumption is true only in special cases.

Nancy Leveson

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Stephen Jay Gould

Creationists argue that natural selection is only a negative process, and therefore cannot create anything. Chopra argues that skepticism is only a negative process, and therefore does not lead to knowledge. Both are wrong for the same reasons. They ignore the generation of diversity and new ideas upon which natural selection and skepticism acts. Weeding out the unfit is critical to both - natural selection allows evolution to proceed, and skepticism allows science to advance.

Steven Novella

Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

You know, the very strength of science is that it keeps us from the errors of mythos, from getting committed to a set of memes that we adopt because of congruence with what we think we know. Science demands skepticism.