Things pessimists say: “I’ve given up. I don’t think I can do anything, the world to me is a place where nobody can do anything. And so why should you go do something because if you fail, then I’m right, which is great, but if you succeed, then you just make me look bad.” Naval

If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. — Karl Popper

What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals. — Karl Popper

The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. — Karl Popper

Criticism is how we sift the good, the beautiful, the true, the useful from the bad, the ugly, the false, and the damaging. Brett Hall

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational. David Deutsch

For no doubt the spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop. — Karl Popper

For there is no freedom if it is not secured by the state; and conversely, only a state which is controlled by free citizens can offer them any reasonable security at all. — Karl Popper

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

Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics. David Deutsch

At China, between 1959 and 1961, some 45 million people starved to death. Was it drought, pestilence, plague? No. It was poor policy, it was coercion, it was not allowing individuals to solve their own problems at the local level via trading among themselves. Brett Hall

That a claim is falsifiable does not mean the claim is scientific. Brett Hall

Good explanations are Deutsch’s improvement upon the scientific method. At the same time, it’s beyond science. It’s not just true in science, but in all of life. We navigate our way through life, and we do it successfully by creating good explanations. Naval

We never knew that pitchblende ore could be turned into uranium until advanced knowledge of mining and nuclear physics taught us how. Brett Hall

Deutsch’s epistemology is centered around good explanations. It takes Popper’s view of science and truth-seeking as being error-correcting mechanisms and expands on it. Naval

Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes. David Deutsch

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. David Deutsch

Newton’s theory, consisting of the law of inertia, the law of gravity, etc., may be true, or very approximately true, i.e., the world may be as the theory asserts it is. But there is no statement of determinism in this theory. — Karl Popper

Humans are exceptional; humans are capable of maximal knowledge. Naval

The pursuit of knowledge and its objective growth is only possible because certainty is not. Brett Hall