Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Karl Popper

1902 – 1994 CE

Major Philosopher of Science

Social commentator, philosopher, and academic; Popper grew up in an academic household. His parents were good friends of Freud's sister and his father was a true bibliophile with as many as 14,000 books in his personal library. During his student years, he became very interested and supportive of Marxism until police shot 8 of his unarmed friends. That led him to a life-long support of social liberalism and his creation of an evolved philosophy of science. One of his students—George Soros—became a philanthropic billionaire and now support a think-tank dedicated to Popper's influence. Rather than fixating on just one point of view, he worked to reconcile diverse ideas from socialism, libertarianism, social democracy, traditional liberalism and conservatism.

Eras

Unlisted Sources

In Search of a Better World (1984)

On Freedom (1958)

The Open Society and its Enemies

Unended Quest

Utopia and Violence (1947)​

Quotes by Karl Popper (31 quotes)

“I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

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“This civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'enclosed society,' with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

Themes: Civilization

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“we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead... By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

Themes: Leadership

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“All things living are in search of a better world.”

from In Search of a Better World (1984)

Themes: Progress

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“The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.”

from In Search of a Better World (1984)

Themes: Shambhala

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“Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.”

from In Search of a Better World (1984)

Themes: Mistakes Science

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“Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.”

from In Search of a Better World (1984)

Themes: Curiosity Doubt

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“New ideas have a striking similarity to genetic mutations... they are also probabilistic and not in themselves originally selected or adequate, but on them there subsequently operates natural selection which eliminates inappropriate mutations. Now we could conceive of a similar process with respect to new ideas and to free-will decisions, and similar things.”

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“[Although Thucydides was the] greatest historian, perhaps, who ever lived, [he represents] an interpretation, a point of view; and in this we need not agree with him.”

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“organized religion... goes back to myths which, though they may have a kernel of truth, are untrue. Why then should the Jewish myth be true and the Indian and Egyptian myths not be true?”

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“Definitions are dogmas; only the conclusions drawn from them can afford us any new insight.”

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“Hume's and Schlick's ontological thesis that there cannot exist anything intermediate between chance and determinism seems to me not only highly dogmatic (not to say doctrinaire) but clearly absurd; and it is understandable only on the assumption that they believed in a complete determinism in which chance has no status except as a symptom of our ignorance.”

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“The spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop.”

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“We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.”

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“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

Themes: Delusion

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“We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves.”

from On Freedom (1958)

Themes: Freedom Integrity

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“Democracy does not ensure that anything is accomplished — certainly not an economic miracle... How someone fares in life is largely a matter of luck or grace, and to a comparatively small degree perhaps also of competence, diligence, and other virtues. The most we can say of democracy or freedom is that they give our personal abilities a little more influence on our well-being.”

from On Freedom (1958)

Themes: Democracy

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  • It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.

from On Freedom (1958)

Themes: Failure Victory

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“the most deplorable fact that Aristotle, by using this complicated and somewhat pretentious jargon, fascinated only too many philosophers... Aristotle, who was a historian of the more encyclopedic type, made no direct contribution to historicism”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

Themes: History

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“there is surely no reason to believe that capitalism, of all social systems, will last for ever. On the contrary, the material conditions of production, and with them, the ways of human life, have never changed so quickly as they have done under capitalism. By changing its own foundations in this way, capitalism is bound to transform itself and to produce a new period in the history of mankind.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

Themes: Capitalism

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“the final conclusion reached [by Marx] is that, after the victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie, there will be a society consisting of one class only, and, therefore, a classless society, a society without exploitation; that is to say socialism.”

Themes: Socialism

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“there can be no history of 'the past as it actually did happen;' there can only be historical interpretations and none of them final; every generation has a right to frame its own... Historicism is out to find The Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover The Clue To History, or the Meaning of History.”

Themes: History

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“We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves.”

from On Freedom (1958)

Themes: Integrity

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“Although I consider our political world to be the best of which we have any historical knowledge, we should beware of attributing this fact to democracy or to freedom. Freedom is not a supplier who delivers goods to our door.”

from On Freedom (1958)

Themes: Government

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“In the war between Athenian democracy and the 'arrested oligarchic tribalism of Sparta', we must never forget Thucydides's 'involuntary bias', and that 'his heart was not with Athens, his native city.'”

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“historicism is a social and political and moral (or, shall I say, immoral) philosophy, and it has been as such most influential since the beginning of our civilization.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

Themes: History

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“We can never speak of cause and effect in an absolute way, but that an event is a cause of another event which is its effect, relative to some universal law. However, these universal laws are very often so trivial that as a rule we take them for granted instead of making conscious use of them.”

from The Open Society and its Enemies

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“I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still... It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream”

from Unended Quest

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“I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still... It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream”

from Unended Quest

Themes: Socialism

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“freedom is more important than equality; the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”

from Unended Quest

Themes: Freedom Equality

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“Hitler succeeded in degrading the moral standards of our Western world, and that in the world of today there is more violence and brutal force than would have been tolerated even in the decade after the first World war. And we must face the possibility that our civilization may ultimately be destroyed by those new weapons which Hitlerism wished upon us... for no doubt, the spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop.”

from Utopia and Violence (1947)​

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