Hypothesis Quotes

1. "God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light."
Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel

2. "My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately."
Author: Alison Bechdel

3. "Look ... first and foremost, I'm a scientist. That means it's my responsibility to make observations and gather evidence before forming a hypothesis, not vice versa."
Author: Allen Steele

4. "Today's education is entirely defective to the extent that, calling itself positivist, it begins with abusing the child's trust by presenting as true what is only either a temporary phenomenon or a hypothesis, when it's not a blatant untruth; and to the extent that it prevents children from forming in good time their own opinions by creasing into them certain habits that make their freedom of judgement an illusion"
Author: André Breton

5. "To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with."
Author: Angela Carter

6. "I tell you what you'll never really know:all the medical hypothesisthat explained my brain will never be as true as thesestruck leaves letting go."
Author: Anne Sexton

7. "Science isn't about authority or white coats; it's about following a method. That method is built on core principles: precision and transparency; being clear about your methods; being honest about your results; and drawing a clear line between the results, on the one hand, and your judgment calls about how those results support a hypothesis."
Author: Ben Goldacre

8. "Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated."
Author: Charles Jules Henry Nicole

9. "I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna."
Author: Charles Lyell

10. "One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that is the right word – of the Problem of Evil; the fact that it is not unreasonable to place a substantial probability on the hypothesis that a future theory will fix those values; and the sheer incoherence of computations of the ‘chances' of fine-tuning were there no fine-tuner."
Author: Colin Howson

11. "The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

12. "That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis--an idea--and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?"
Author: Esther Hicks

13. "We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt this Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis?"
Author: Frank Tipler

14. "After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige."
Author: Franz Cumont

15. "Politics bores you?" Bronsen said.Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations."
Author: Iain Pears

16. "The results of decades of neurotransmitter-depletion studies point to one inescapable conclusion: low levels or serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine do not cause depression. here is how the authors of the most complete meta-analysis of serotonin-depletion studies summarized the data: "Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood.' In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only with clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence."
Author: Irving Kirsch

17. "These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing."
Author: Isaac Asimov

18. "Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called (and is called to this day) the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direction of evolution and the origin of life; it is provable in terms of Shannon entropy in the possible chemical alphabets: Once "information" has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of sequence."
Author: James Gleick

19. "The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness."
Author: Jerome Bruner

20. "He was more aware than is usually admitted of the Freudian implications in the novel, and the note of ambiguity could have insinuated itself at least as a partial effort to conceal the radical thesis and the problem of form. Since this is exactly what happens in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the hypothesis is not without possibilities."
Author: John E. Stoll

21. "The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis."
Author: John Fowles

22. "Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place."
Author: Julian Huxley

23. "This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion."
Author: Karen Armstrong

24. "As a mother I see the future in the present. Every little thing she does or says makes me form a hypothesis of how she will see life and treat others in 20 years. So I plan for how amazing she will be now. Instead of living my life I have to live hers. Some may not understand how important it is to be a parent. How present, efficient, selfless, and imaginative you must be. But I do. I only pray that this little face is stronger than I am and more successful for this world and the next. I chase her butterflies. She was created from scratch and presented as a gift from God. She will never roam free, unattended and unloved."
Author: Kimberley Alecia Smith

25. "But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!"
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

26. "There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer's point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement, whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling."
Author: Matthew B. Crawford

27. "Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not."
Author: Milan Kundera

28. "It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth."
Author: Milan Kundera

29. "Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!"
Author: Milton Friedman

30. "Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war."
Author: Nikola Tesla

31. "The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts."
Author: Oliver Joseph Lodge

32. "God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

33. "Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis."
Author: Pierre Laplace

34. "Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence"."
Author: R.D. Laing

35. "It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence."
Author: Richard Dawkins

36. "Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made."
Author: Robert K. Greenleaf

37. "The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end."
Author: Robert Musil

38. "There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past."
Author: Robert Nozick

39. "The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena."
Author: Robert Nozick

40. "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Author: Samuel P. Huntington

41. "Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists."
Author: Serge Lang

42. "I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground."
Author: Serge Lang

43. "She fluttered her fan. "And do you know what they say of women of a certain age, what they want above all?"Desire simmered in him at her not quite smile. "Do tell.""To be rid of you, Hastings. So that they don't have to waste what remains of their precious few years suffering your lecherous looks.""If I stopped looking at you lecherously, you'd miss it.""Why don't we test that hypothesis? You stop and I'll tell you after ten years or so whether I miss it." ....He rose and bowed slightly. "You wouldn't last two weeks, Miss Fitzhugh."
Author: Sherry Thomas

44. "Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability."
Author: Sidney Hook

45. "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory."
Author: Stephen Hawking

46. "An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "It seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked"
Author: Thomas Gilovich

48. "The only part of evolution in which any considerable interest is felt is evolution applied to man. A hypothesis in regard to the rocks and plant life does not affect the philosophy upon which one's life is built. Evolution applied to fish, birds and beasts would not materially affect man's view of his own responsibilities except as the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis as to these would be used to support a similar hypothesis as to man. The evolution that is harmful—distinctly so—is the evolution that destroys man's family tree as taught by the Bible and makes him a descendant of the lower forms of life. This ... is a very vital matter."
Author: William Jennings Bryan

49. "The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a 'hypothesis,' but the word 'hypothesis,' though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word 'guess.' If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word 'hypothesis.' When it is understood that "hypothesis" means 'guess,' people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it."
Author: William Jennings Bryan

50. "I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the Copernican view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypothesis. To refute the latter I have collected many proofs, but I do not publish them, because I am deterred by the fate of our teacher Copernicus who, although he had won immortal fame with a few, was ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid)."
Author: You

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