Bland Quotes (2 quotes)
Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining. too confining. The insistence on bland impersonality and the widespread indifference to anything like the display of a unique human author in scientific exposition, have transformed the reading of most scientific papers into an act of tedious drudgery.
In Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age (1990), Preface, xi-xii.
Science has never shaken off the impress of its origin In the historical revolt of the later Renaissance, It has remained predominately an anti-rationalistic movement, based on a naive faith. What reasoning it has wanted it borrowed from mathematics, which is a surviving relic of Greek rationalism, following the deductive method. Science repudiated Philosophy. In other words, it never cared to justify its faith or explain its meaning; it has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume.
In Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (1926), 23-24.
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) -- 
