Kuhn, Thomas

"Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly."

"The scientist who pauses to examine his own practice will discover equally unsuspected things about the nature of knowledge itself."

"A paradigm is what you think with, not what you think about."

"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."

"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."

"The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them."

"Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change."

"No natural history can be interpreted as anything but a narrative."

"Revolutions are seldom completed by their original leaders."

"The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process."

"Those who have examined historical records of other cultures have often noted that sense-making is a deep human drive."

"In science, as in the world at large, today's marginal idea may be tomorrow's mainstream belief."

"Scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developments that replace one older conception of nature with an incompatible new one."

"The scientist who does not display the virtues of flexibility and tolerance is likely to do harm to his science."

"Progress is not a pre-condition for applying the concept of evolution."

"Innovation comes more readily to the ignorant, for they do not know all the reasons something cannot be done."

"Knowledge is not simple to acquire and often resists the most diligent efforts."

"The man who succeeds has a very high tolerance for ambiguity and an ability to think in contradictions."

"Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong."

"The puzzles upon which normal science concentrates are just not about nature directly; they are about nature-as-seen-through-the-reading-provided-by-a-paradigm."

"When a scientist can no longer take his field for granted, when he has to patch up its dogmas with ad hoc modifications to each in turn, he is in a state of crisis."

"Most people are really quite ignorant of the extent to which they have been indoctrinated into certain assumptions."

"A new theory is extremely difficult to adopt if one is trained in the old one."

"The individual scientist must make an act of faith in the current paradigm before he can successfully pursue normal science."

"Historians, like philosophers, frequently confound the terms in which scientists thought with the terms in which later workers have thought."

"Intellectual revolutions have more in common with Gestalt switches than with cumulative additions to knowledge."

"The successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science."

"What makes a field mature is not having all the answers, but having a shared set of problems."

"The man who insists on and can achieve real freedom from the paradigm has a considerable advantage."

"Scientific work must be the product of several independent workers or a great distance may be experienced with respect to the truth."