Vinícius Medina Kern

Peter Marshall, clérigo escocês:
Um mundo diferente não pode ser construído por gente indiferente. [“A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.“]
(O itálico é meu. Sempre penso nisso quando passo por salas vazias com luz, ventilador e ar condicionado ligados, tudo pago pelo povo trabalhador, especialmente nos ambientes das “””Ciências Humanas”””. Ou quando vejo a elite brasileira recém-ingressada na universidade pedindo esmola no semáforo, em vez de vender algo ou fazer algum serviço para ganhar o dinheiro da cerveja dos veteranos. Bela elite, belo progresso nos espera).

Santa Teresa de Ávila en el Libro de las Fundaciones según José luis Cancelo Garcia:
Si el diablo está tan nervioso es porque tiene perdida la batalla.

Neil deGrasse Tyson in “What Science Is, and How and Why It Works” (Re-posted from the Huffington Post November 21, 2015):

If you cherry-pick scientific truths to serve cultural, economic, religious or political objectives, you undermine the foundations of an informed democracy.
Carl Sagan (with Anne Kalosh, in Hemispheres (October 1994) and reprinted all over, including in Conversations with Carl Sagan):

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Winston Churchill, Nobel laureate (Literature, 1953 – and crusher of nazism in his spare time):

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
“Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”
“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
“This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”

Mario Bunge:

Cuando en las ciencias o técnicas se afirma que cierto problema es insoluble, se exige una demostración rigurosa de tal insolubilidad. Y cuando un científico o técnico somete un texto a publicación, lo menos que exigen sus jueces es que sea inteligible. ¿Por qué? Porque los seres racionales ansían comprender y porque solamente los enunciados claros son susceptibles de ser puestos a prueba para averiguar si son verdaderos o falsos.
En las humanidades ocurre o debería ocurrir otro tanto, pero no siempre es así. Nietzsche le reprochó su claridad a John Stuart Mill. En cambio, Henri Bergson, pese a ser intuicionista, escribió claramente y declaró que “la claridad es la cortesía del filósofo”. La oscuridad es grosera, porque supone que el interlocutor es incapaz de entender y dialogar.
(Xenius, Platón y Manolito, La Nación, 9 de julio de 2008)

If one aims to judge political movements, their deeds are far more important than their speeches, which are often masking rather than revealing.
(Emergence and Convergence, 2003, p. 101).

Arthur Schopenhauer em A Arte de Escrever (2011), antologia de ensaios recolhidos de Parerga und Paralipomena (1851):

Ah, essa pessoa deve ter pensado muito pouco para poder ter lido tanto!

Edsger W. Dijkstra (Feb 7, 1994 at the Industrial Forum, The University of Texas at Austin):

Just for being different and doing things the uneducated cannot understand, the academics are hated and feared, vide Socrates, executed in 399 BC, Archimedes, killed in 212 BC, and, more recently, Hypatia, AD 415 barbarously murdered by a Christian mob. The original Oxford Colleges were buildings fortified in order to protect the students against the rabble, and if you think that that is old hat, I refer you to the DDR or the People’s Republic of China of only 25 years ago. It is a miracle whenever, these days, the academic world is tolerated at all.

Pierre Bordieu em Sociologia geral, v. 1: Lutas de classificação:

No trabalho de pesquisa como eu concebo, muitas vezes é necessário se sentir burro, incapaz, incompetente, idiota.

Alan F. Chalmers em O que é ciência, afinal?:

Nós começamos confusos e terminamos confusos, em um nível mais alto.