“Orthodoxy means not thinking - not having to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” - George Orwell, 1984

“In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” - Galileo Galilei

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” - Albert Einstein

 “Don't let your minds be cluttered up with the prevailing doctrine.” - Alexander Fleming

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” - Bertrand Russell

“One must not mistake majority for truth.” - Jean Cocteau

 “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” - Thomas Jefferson

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

“The highest mountain of all to overcome is one's own preconceptions.” - du Gabriel

“History shows clearly that the advances of science have always been frustrated by the tyrannical influences of certain preconceived notions which were turned into unassailable dogmas. For that reason alone, every serious scientist should periodically make a profound re-examination of his basic principles.” - Louis de Broglie

"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them." - Arthur C. Clarke

 “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” - Max Planck

“Fundamental challenges to disciplines tend to come from outside. It is customary for students to be introduced to their fields of study gradually, as slowly unfolding mysteries, so that by the time they can see their subject as a whole, they have been so thoroughly imbued with conventional preconceptions and patterns of thought that they are extremely unlikely to be able to question its basic premises.” - Martin Bernal

 “...It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the Truth” - Morpheus

“It's the cat that catches the most mice that is the best cat; regardless of its colour or its name.” - Teng Hsiao Ping

“You can't vote on the Truth” - Halton Arp

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

“In the end, The Universe will have its say.” - Sir Fred Hoyle

“What men want is not knowledge but certainty.” - Bertrand Russell

“It's not what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know for certain that just ain't so.” - Mark Twain

“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.” - Bertrand Russell

“It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example - in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism - the positions are now reversed. Science will not tolerate criticism of Special Relativity, while Theology talks freely about the death of God, religionless Christianity, and so on.” - Herbert Dingle

“All scientific knowledge is provisional. Everything that science “knows,” even the long-established theories, is subject to reexamination as new information comes in.” - Scientific American editorial [talk about ironic]

“When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions; that is the heart of science.” - Carl Sagan

"If the observations disagree with the predictions, one has to discard or modify the theory. At least, that is what is supposed to happen. In practice, people often question the accuracy of the observations and the reliability and moral character of those making the observations." - Stephen Hawking

“When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect -- but do not believe him. Never put your trust in anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel Laureate, may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of younger generations find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical -- always think for yourself.” - Linus Pauling, while he was in Sweden, waiting to receive his first Nobel Prize, speaking to a group of university students.

“Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.” - Bernard Haisch

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ‘conceptual necessities’, ‘a priori situations’, etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." - Albert Einstein

“The fool wonders, the wise man asks.” - Benjamin Disraeli

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Aldous Huxley

“There is no religion higher than Truth” - Theosophical Society motto

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” - Descartes

“An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.” - Russell Wayne Baker

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” - Herbert Spencer

"To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another." - Bernard Haisch

“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer 

“Analogy is the guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries.” - Helena Blavatsky

"Thus the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has thought, about that which everybody sees.” - Erwin Schrödinger

“If I see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants” - Isaac Newton

 “The experimental data is real. The equations that interrelate it are fairly accurate. Everything else is opinion.” – du Gabriel

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” - Daniel Dennett

“Before sense experiences become ‘observations’ we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited.” - Richard Lewontin 

“It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.” - Roger Lewin 

“Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion.” - Stephen Jay Gould 

“But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.” - Stephen Jay Gould

"I agree with you that it is important to examine our presuppositions, thoroughly and once for all, in order to establish something solid. For I hold that it is only when we can prove all that we bring forward that we perfectly understand the thing under consideration. I know that the common herd takes little pleasure in these researches, but I know also that the common herd take little pains thoroughly to understand things." - Gottfried Leibniz

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless THAT fact has at some time struck him. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.” - Wittgenstein

“The eye can never have too much seeing, so the mind is never satisfied with sufficient truth.” - Nicholas of Cusa

“I want to know how God created this world.  I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element.  I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.” - Albert Einstein 

Physical Reality and Mathematics

“Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for reality” - Albert Einstein

“Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” - Nikola Tesla

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” - Albert Einstein

“The Occidental mind loves abstractions, loves to entify abstractions, to look upon them as concrete realities; and this psychological bias or habit is the cause of most of the philosophic and psychological confusion so noteworthy in the West at the present time.” - G. de Purucker

"Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observation does not prove that one's theory is correct." - Paul Dirac

“Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.” - Albert Einstein

“We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.” - Hannes Alfvén

“We should remember that there was once a discipline called Natural Philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.” - Hannes Alfvén

“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little” - Bertrand Russell

“Miserable mind, you get your information from your senses, yet do you try to overthrow them? The overthrow will be your downfall.” – Democritus

“Mathematics, which is the most advanced science, should be used to analyze observations and experimental data. It should not be used to create a new physical science based on hypothetical equations” - Pari Spolter

“Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an 'elegant' or 'robust' theory. But it isn't science.” - Halton Arp

“I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.” - Plato

Understanding and Causality

“It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank.” - Helena P. Blavatsky

“The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.” - Albert Einstein

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” - Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner for his achievements in QED (Quantum electrodynamics)

“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it.” - Richard Feynman

“What cannot be understood, cannot be believed” - P. Abablard

“A wise man does not deride or derail but seeks to understand” - Baruch Spinoza

“Explaining a phenomenon without fully recognizing the Principle of Causality is not scientific. It is absurd.” - Paul Marmet

“Causality is the basis of all scientific work. Causality is the condition that renders science possible.” - Immanuel Kant

“The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened.” - Rudolph Arnheim

“The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding.” - The Kybalion

"When they give a person a Bachelors degree, they take about their mouth, when they give them a Masters degree, they take away their brains, and when they give them a PhD, they give them back their mouth." - Helen Kehr Billings, PhD

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe them.” - George Orwell

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men" - George Orwell

About the Causal Substrate

“To suppose that one body may act upon another at a distance through vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty for thinking, can ever fall into.” - Isaac Newton

“It is inconceivable to doubt that light consists in the motion of some sort of matter. […] (A)t least in the true Philosophy, in which one conceives the causes of all natural effects in terms of mechanical motions. This, in my opinion, we must necessarily do or else renounce all hopes of ever comprehending anything in Physics.” - Christiaan Huygens

“I cannot conceive curved lines of force without the conditions of a physical existence in that intermediate space.” - Michael Faraday

“Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body...” - James C. Maxwell

"In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy." - James C. Maxwell

"I cannot but regard the ether, which can be the seat of an electromagnetic field with its energy and its vibrations, as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary matter." - Hendrik Lorentz

"According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." - Albert Einstein

"If one examines the question in the light of present-day knowledge, one finds that the aether is no longer ruled out by relativity, and good reasons can now be advanced for postulating an aether. [...] With the new theory of electrodynamics, we are rather forced to have an aether." - Paul Dirac

“And so at last I admit to an error in my metaphysics. A void does exist. Several hundred thousand of them. Locked in some ivory towers with eyes that don't believe what they see; ears that don't allow reasonable questions; tongues that speak only in mystic signs and symbols; because right where there should have been a brain, there's "The void"!” - Glird

Unity

"All things come out of the One and the One out of all things." - Heraclitus

“Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” - Gottfried Leibniz

“There is one common flow, one common breathing. All things are in sympathy.” - Hippocrates

“Thou canst not stir a flower, without the troubling of a star” - Francis Thompson

“While All is in THE ALL, it is equally true that THE ALL is in All. To him who truly understands this truth hath come great knowledge.” - The Kybalion

“You cannot conceive the many without the one... The study of the unit is among those that lead the mind on and turn it to the vision of reality.” - Plato

"All life comes from the one universal source, call it Allah, God or Parmeshwara." - Gandhi

“There is no real separateness in nature. We are all part of one another. Outwardly we may be many, but in essence all is one.” - David Pratt

"Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness?" - Isha Upanishad

Infinity

“From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways.” - Baruch Spinoza

"I cleave the heavens, and soar to the infinite. What others see from afar, I leave far behind me." - Giordano Bruno

“God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” - Corpus Hermeticum

“...the wise man looks into space and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big, for he knows that there is no limit to dimensions.” - Lao-tse

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour” - William Blake

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” - William Blake

Some Positive Thinking

“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.” - Chinese Proverb

“Our task must be to free ourselves - by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” - Albert Einstein

“...What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... and peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment” - Nikola Tesla

 "Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion.” - David Icke

“Peace is the only battle worth waging.” - Albert Camus

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

“... it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.” - Nikola Tesla

“You shall know The Truth, and The Truth shall set you free” - Jesus Christ

Miscellaneous

“Human ingenuity may make various inventions, but it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous.” - Leonardo Da Vinci

“Complexity is but the many faces of simplicity. The road to complexity consists of just a bunch of simple steps. They only look enormous if you skip the littlest ones.” – Glird

“From every power that all the world enchains, Man frees himself when self-control he gains.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.” - Allan Bloom

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” - Anonymous

“As humans, we readily accept that which we wish to be true and readily reject that which is in conflict with our belief systems.” - Gary Meisner

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” - Winston Churchill

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” - Albert Einstein

 “Never, never, never give up” - Winston Churchill

“In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.” - Ken Wilber

Child: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Child: There is no spoon.