Firm quotes

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Isaac_Asimov

Evidence

“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
  • Source: Isaac Asimov, In David S. Bradford, In the Beginning: Building the Temple of Zion, published 2008.

Michael_Polanyi

Scientific Method Elucidation

“Almost every major systematic error which has deluded men for thousands of years relied on practical experience. Horoscopes, incantations, oracles, magic, witchcraft, the cures of witch doctors and of medical practitioners before the advent of modern medicine, were all firmly established through the centuries in the eyes of the public by their supposed practical successes. The scientific method was devised precisely for the purpose of elucidating the nature of things under more carefully controlled conditions and by more rigorous criteria than are present in the situations created by practical problems.”
  • Source: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), 183.

Franklin_D_Roosevelt

Fear Itself

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

  • Source: Spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt the 1933 U.S. presidential inaugural address, 1933-03-04.

Herbert_Simon

Organization and Market Economy

“The economic units in capitalist societies are mostly business firms, which are themselves hierarchic organizations, some of enormous size, that make almost negligible use of markets in their internal functioning. Roughly eighty percent of the human economic activity in the American economy, usually regarded as almost the epitome of a "market" economy, takes place in the internal environments of business and other organizations and not in the external, between-organization environments of markets. To avoid misunderstanding, it would be appropriate to call such a society an organization-&-market economy; for in order to give an account of it we have to pay as much attention to organizations as to markets.”

Invisible Hand

“In examining the processes of social coordination, economics has given top billing sometimes almost exclusive billing to the market mechanism. It is indeed a remarkable mechanism... The optimality theorems stretch credibility, so far as real-world markets are concerned, because they require substantive rationality of the kinds we found implausible in our examination of the theory of the firm. Markets populated by consumers and producers who satisfice instead of optimizing do not meet the conditions on which the theorems rest.”