Unended Quest Quotes

“I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. 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.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“It can't happen here" is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“There can be no human society without conflict: such a society would be a society not of friends but of ants. Even if it were attainable, there are human values of the greatest importance which would be destroyed by its attainment, and which therefore should prevent us from attempting to bring it about. On the other hand, we certainly ought to bring about a reduction of conflict. So already we have here an example of a clash of values and principles. This example also shows that clashes of values and principles may be valuable, and indeed essential for an open society.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty, and both should be abandoned.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“...if God had wanted to put everything into the world from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But He seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one’s intellectual development. There is nothing to compare with it, since very few people (Helen Keller is the great exception) can remember what it meant for them to learn to speak.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Conjecture or hypothesis must come before observation or perception: we have inborn expectations; we have latent inborn knowledge, in the form of latent expectations, to be activated by a stimuli to which we react as a rule while engaged in active exploration. All learning is a modification (it may be a refutation)of some prior knowledge and thus, in the last analysis, of some inborn knowledge.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“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.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“From this point of view the question of the scientific status of Darwinian theory—in the widest sense, the theory of trial and error-elimination—becomes an interesting one. I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Explanation is always incomplete: we can always raise another Why-questions. And the new why-questions may lead to a new theory which not only "explains" the old theory but corrects it.
This is why the evolution of Physics is likely to be an endless process of correction and better approximation. And even if one day we should reach a stage where our theories were no longer open to correction, because they are simply true, they would still not be complete - and we should know it. For Godel's famous incompleteness theorem would come into play: in view of the Mathematical background of Physics, at best an infinite sequence of such true theories would be needed in order to answer the problems which any given (formalized) theory would be undecidable.
Such considerations do not prove that the objective physical world is incomplete, or undetermined: they only show the essential incompleteness of our efforts. But they also show that it's barely possible (if possible at all) for science to reach a stage in which it can provide genuine support for the view that the physical world is deterministic. Why, the, should we not accept the verdict of common sense- at least until these arguments have been refuted?”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“All nationalism or racialism is evil, and Jewish nationalism is no exception.”
― Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but that I had also actually noticed quite a bit of what was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism. But I had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to my friends, partly out of loyalty to "the cause", and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one's intellectual conscience over a minor point one doesn't wish to give in too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that maybe required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one's moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It's like being eager to throw good money after bad.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Success in life is largely a matter of luck. There is a very weak relationship between merit and success, and one can come across people who possess great virtue yet have not succeeded in almost every aspect of life.”
― Karl Popper, Unended quest: An intellectual autobiography

“The expressionist view is that our talents, our gifts, and perhaps our upbringing, and thus "our whole personality", determine what we do. The result is good or bad, according to whether or not we are gifted and interesting personalities.
In opposition to this I suggest that everything depends upon the give-and-take between ourselves and our task, our work, our problems, our world 3; upon the repercussions upon us of this world; upon the feedback, which can be amplified by our criticism of what we've done. It's through the attempt to see objectively the work we have done -that's to see it critically- and to do it better, through the interaction between our actions and their objective results, that we can transcend our talents, and ourselves.
As with our children, so with our theories, and ultimately with all the work we do: our products become independent of their makers. We may gain more knowledge from our children or from our theories than we ever imparted to them. This is how we can lift ourselves out of the morass of our ignorance; and we can all contribute to world 3.
If I am right in my conjecture that we grow, and become ourselves, only in interaction with world 3, then the fact that we can all contribute to this world, if only a little, can give comfort to everyone; and especially to one who feels that in struggling with ideas he has found more happiness than he could ever deserve.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“I conjecture that the origin of life and the origin of problems coincide.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“And yet I believe I have taken the theory almost at its best— almost in its most testable form. One might say that it “almost predicts” a great variety of forms of life.283 In other fields, its predictive or explanatory power is still more disappointing. Take “adaptation”. At first sight natural selection appears to explain it, and in a way it does; but hardly in a scientific way. To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological. Indeed we use the terms “adaptation” and “selection” in such a way that we can say that, if the species were not adapted, it would have been eliminated by natural selection. Similarly, if a species has been eliminated it must have been ill adapted to the conditions. Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival value, and can be measured by actual success in survival: there is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.
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Now to the degree that Darwinism creates the same impression, it is not so very much better than the theistic view of adaptation; it is, therefore important to show that Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but metaphysical. But its value for science as a metaphysical research programme is very great, especially if it is admitted that it may be criticized, and improved upon.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“I don't think highly of the theoretical or explanatory power of of the theory of evolution. But I think that an evolutionary approach to biological problems is inescapable, and also that in so desperate a problem situation we must clutch gratefully even at a straw. So, I propose, to start, that we regard the human mind quite naively as if it were a highly developed bodily organ, and that we ask ourselves, as we might with respect to a sense organ, what it contributes to the household of the organism.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“Although I have known sorrow and great sadness, as is everybody's lot, I don't think that I have had an unhappy hour as a philosopher since we returned to England. I have worked hard, and I have often got deep into insoluble difficulties. But I have been most happy in finding new problems, in wrestling with them, and in making some progress. This, or so I feel, is the best life. It seems to me infinitely better than the life of mere contemplation (to say nothing of divine self-contemplation) which Aristotle recommends as the best. It is a completely restless life, but it is highly self-contained/autark in Plato's sense, although no life, of course, can be fully autark.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“The reality of time and change seemed to me the crux of realism.”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography

“I have in lectures often described this interesting situation by saying: we never know what we are talking about. For when we propose a theory, or try to understand a theory, we also propose, or try to understand, its logical implications; that is, all those statements which follow from it. But this, as we have just seen, is a hopeless task : there is an infinity of unforeseeable nontrivial statements belonging to the informative content of any theory, and an exactly corresponding infinity of statements belonging to its logical content. We can therefore never know or understand all the implications of any theory, or its full significance
Chapter 7”
― Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography