Popper Quotes

“Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.”
― Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism

“Comencemos por rechazar la errada suposición de que el liberalismo es una ideología. Una ideología es siempre una concepción del acontecer humano (...) que parte del rígido criterio de que el idéologo conoce de dónde viene la humanidad, por qué se desplaza en esa dirección y hacia dónde debe ir. De ahí que toda ideología, por definición, sea un tratado de 'ingeniería social', y cada ideólogo sea, a su vez, un 'ingeniero social'. Alguien dedicado a la siempre peligrosa tarea de crear 'hombres nuevos', no contaminados por las huellas del antiguo régimen. Sólo que esa actitud, lamentablemente, suele dar lugar a grandes catástrofes, y en ella está, como señaló Popper, el origen del totalitarismo.”
― Carlos Alberto Montaner, Las Columnas de La Libertad

“...Alas, this is simply an illusion. For how can it be possible to relate two or more observational experiences, even if they concern the relations between things that are perceived to be the same or similar, as falsifying (or confirming) each other, rather than merely neutrally record them as one experience here and one experience here, one repetitive of another or not, and leaving it at that (i.e., regarding them as logically incommensurable) unless one presupposed the existence of time-invariantly operating causes? Only if the existence of such time-invariantly operating causes could be assumed would there by any logically compelling reason to regard them as commensurable and as falsifying or confirming each other.

However, Popper, like all empiricists, denies that any such assumption can be given an a priori defense (there are for him no such things as a priori true propositions about reality such as the causality principle would have to be) and is itself merely hypothetical. Yet clearly, if the possibility of constantly operating causes as such is only a hypothetical one, then it can hardly be claimed, as Popper does, that any particular predictive hypothesis could ever be falsified or confirmed. For then the falsification (or confirmation) would have to be considered a hypothetical one: any predictive hypothesis would only under go tests whose status as tests were themselves hypothetical. And hence one would be right back in the muddy midst of skepticism.

Only if the causality principle as such could be unconditionally established as true, could any particular causal hypothesis ever be testable, and the outcome of a test provide rational grounds for deciding whether or not to uphold a given hypothesis.”
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method