Quotes from William Kingdon Clifford

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command and that is the will to obey.

Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.

Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.

The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.

It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

Si una persona, al sostener una creencia que le fue enseñada en la niñez o de la que fue persuadida más tarde, rebaja y echa al un lado todas las dudas sobre ella que broten en su mente, evita a propósito la lectura de libros y la compañía que la cuestione o la discuta, y ve como impías aquellas preguntas que no puedan contestarse fácilmente sin perturbarla, entonces la vida de esa persona es un único y largo pecado contra la humanidad.

If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.

We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.

An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.