227 Quotes by Karl Popper

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

It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.

Theories are nets cast to catch what we call ‘the world’: to rationalize, to explain, and to master it. We endeavor to make the mesh ever finer and finer.

It can’t happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

This is why the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.

We do not know anything – this is the first. Therefore, we should be very modest – this is the second. Not to claim that we do know when we do not – this is the third. That’s the kind of attitude I’d like to popularize. There is little hope for success.

For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which is therefore likely to lead to a dictatorship.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.