Inspiration

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.

— Pliny the Elder

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

— William James

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

— Charles Darwin

(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas.

 ― Edward de Bono

An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.

— Bryant H. McGill

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.

— Carl Sagan 

All assumptions must be critically examined.  Arguments from authority are worthless.  Whatever is inconsistent with the facts, no matter how fond of it we are, must be discarded or revised.

— Carl Sagan

To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

— Carl Sagan

... the scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.

― Percy Williams Bridgman, Nobel Prize, 1946.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

— Bertrand Russell

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

— Voltaire

All you need is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure.

— Mark Twain

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

— Charles Darwin

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

— Confucius

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

— Richard P. Feynman

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

— George Orwell

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

 — George Orwell

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

 — George Orwell

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

— Oscar Wilde

For they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected.

— Socrates

What every strong intellect wants to be is a guardian of integrity.

— Jacob Bronowski

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

—  Galileo Galilei

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

— George Bernard Shaw

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.

— Jonathan Swift

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

— Karl Popper

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

— Samuel Johnson

It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.

— Thomas Paine

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

— Thomas Paine

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.

— Thomas Paine

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

— John Stuart Mill 

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

— Kurt Vonnegut