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Viscount Bolingbroke
(16 Sep 1678 - 12 Dec 1751)
English politician and writer who became a member of parliament at age 22 (1701), and became secretary of war (1704) and secretary of state (1710) during the reign of Queen Anne of England. He negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), ending the longest and last of the great European wars. Later, he was a major political propagandist in opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s Whig government.
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Science Quotes by Viscount Bolingbroke (4 quotes)
I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
— Viscount Bolingbroke
In On the Study and Use of History, Letter 2. As cited in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (1875, 10th ed., 1919), 304. Dionysius was quoting Thucydides.
It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature’s God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.
— Viscount Bolingbroke
Letter to Alexander Pope. As cited in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (1875, 10th ed., 1919), 304. The quote has a footnote to compare from Pope’s philosophical poem, Essay on Man (1733-34), epistle iv, lines 331-32: “Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.”
The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount to first principles, and take no body’s word about them.
— Viscount Bolingbroke
In Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: On the Idea of a Patriot King (1749), 78.
When a Parliament, acting against the declared Sense of the Nation, would have appeared as surprising a phœnomenon in the moral World, as a retrograde Motion of the Sun, or any other signal Deviation of Things from their ordinary Course in the natural World.
— Viscount Bolingbroke
In A Dissertation Upon Parties: In Several Letters to Caleb D’Anvers, Esq. (1733, 1735), 39.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
