"Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption."
"Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be."
"If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser."
"I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences."
"I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things."
"Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas."
"I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'"
"In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy."
"What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power."
"Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else."
"One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing."
"Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed."
"Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications."
"If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code."
"Great books are rare."
"One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today."
"Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world."
"The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that."
"One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered."
"Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past."
"The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school."
"The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum."
"The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull."
"Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life."
"Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things."
