J.B.S. HaldaneThinkers

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.

Religion - science is incompatible. Because all scientific experiments are necessarily set up atheistically (i.e. with the assumption that no God, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course) it would be intellectually dishonest to not also be atheistic in the affairs of the world.

Science is the free activity of man's divine faculties of reason and imagination. It is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort, and victory, which it will grant only in exchange for peace and security. It is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul. None of these conquests will ever be complete but all, I believe will be progressive. It may be urged that these powers are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby armed with a box of matches.... I think then that the tendency of applied science is to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at last and extinguishes the evil at its source.

A Theory is composed of four stages of acceptance. First it is seen as worthless nonsense, then as is an interesting but perverse, then true but unimportant, and lastly it is taken to have always been so.

The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.