Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts...

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts...

We often despise what is most useful to us.

We often despise what is most useful to us.

Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if read more

Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.

...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established read more

...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper read more

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.

If a donkey bray at you, don't bray at him.

If a donkey bray at you, don't bray at him.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for read more

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. - The Deer Park.

But now being lifted into high society,
And having pick'd up several odds and ends
Of free read more

But now being lifted into high society,
And having pick'd up several odds and ends
Of free thoughts in his travels for variety,
He deem'd, being in a lone isle, among friends,
That without any danger of a riot, he
Might for long lying make himself amends;
And singing as he sung in his warm youth,
Agree to a short armistice with truth.