Quotes from Paul Karl Feyerabend

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.

All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.

The pygmies, for example, or the Mindoro of the Philippines, do not want equal rights – they just want to be left alone.

In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.

Love of Truth is one of the strongest motives for replacing what really happens by a streamlined account or, to express it in a less polite manner -- love of truth is one of the strongest motives for deceiving oneself and others.

A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed.

Most popular accounts of science and many philosophical analyses are therefor chimeras, pure and simple. They are distorted and misleading as a history of art which regards paintings as natural phenomena of a special kind without ever mentioning the individuals lingering in their neighborhood when they first appear.

Knowledge so conceived is not a series of selfconsistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth.

Não sou daqueles que planejam acuradamente cada vírgula que escrevem e cada sopro de ar que exalam, de modo que a história, isto é, os idiotas de amanhã possam admirar sua perfeição.

Aha! Ora dimmi: pensi di avere una mentalità aperta? A. Si, ragionevolmente aperta. B. E avere una mentalità aperta significa essere pronti ad esaminare i meriti e i demeriti di ogni idea, indipendentemente da quanto possa apparire strana a prima vista, vero?