Karl Popper

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Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) Austrian-born British philosopher of science.

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Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
- The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959)

As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.'
- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

I may illustrate this by two very different examples of human behaviour: that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. Each of these two cases can be explained with equal ease in Freudian and in Adlerian terms. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation. According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove to himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child). I could not think of any human behaviour which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory. It was precisely this fact—that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed—which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.
- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance--the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
- Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)

All things living are in search of a better world.
- In Search of a Better World

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.
- In Search of a Better World

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
- As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee

If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.
- On Freedom in All Life is Problem Solving (1999)

When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we can learn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism. A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others - not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others. The emphasis here is on the idea of criticism or, to be more precise, critical discussion. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.
- On Freedom in All Life is Problem Solving (1999)

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Attributed

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations.

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher (Husserl), and he has a devilish influence on Germany.

I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

Our civilization...has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth— the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle— the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
- Variants: There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
  There is no history, only histories.

The attempt to produce Heaven on Earth often produces Hell.
- Variant: Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.

We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion— that is all "our" doing, "our" invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man— often with the best intentions— much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.