Here are some quotes I like!
If the most intelligent
people we know—the "best-educated," to use a current term—were
also the people who make most extensive use of logico-experimental [scientific] principles in social matters to the exclusion of
all other principles, it would be legitimate to conclude that, in course of time, such people would
reject everything of a non- experimental character; and that other people, more or less their
equals in knowledge, would also be more or less like them in their exclusive acceptance of logico-experimental principles. But the
facts do not stand that way. If theologians have diminished in number among our educated people and lost much of their power,
metaphysicists, properly so called, are still prospering and enjoying fame and influence, to say nothing of those metaphysicists
who call themselves "positivists" or under some other name are merrily overstepping the boundaries of the logico-experimental.
Many scientists who are supremely great in the natural sciences,
where they use logico-experimental principles exclusively or almost so, forget them entirely when they venture into the social sciences.
As regards the masses in the large, what one observes
is an unending alternation of theologies and systems of metaphysics rather than any reduction in the total number of them.
--Vilfredo Pareto. The Mind and Society.
Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare.
He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system.
I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science?
Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing,
how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system.
My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist.
Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
--Richard Hamming. You and Your Research