41 Quotes by William Kingdon Clifford

Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it - the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.

Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.