The great bulk of people infinitely prefer the continuance of a problem which they cannot explain to an explanation they cannot understand.
                                                                      Lord Balfour
The whole outward, visible world with all its being is a signature, or figure of the inward spiritual world; whatever is internally, and however its operation is, so likewise it has its character externally; like as the spirit of each creature sets forth and manifests the internal form of its birth by its body, so does the Eternal Being also.
                                        Jacob Boehme in The Signature of All Things
Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all.  It is only truth as technically verified that interests her.  The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.
                                                            W. James in The Will to Believe
The major part of the scientific world does not wish to examine the evidence, but endeavours only to evade and escape from it.  It is not animated by a scientific desire to know the truth but is in the grip of a psychological urge to disallow what is distressingly unfamiliar.
                                                  G.N.M. Tyrell in The Personality of Man
The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilisation.  Society is never prepared to receive any invention.  Every new thing is resisted, and it takes years for the inventor to get people to listen to him and years more before it can be introduced.
                                                                      Thomas Edison
They (the scientists) willingly believe that facts that cannot be explained by current theories do not exist.
                                                  Alexis Carrel in Man the Unknown
But contemporary science, by the mere fact of having cut itself sharply off from religion and 'mysticism', i.e. by having set up for itself a definite 'taboo', has become an accidental and unreliable instrument of thought.  The constant feeling of this 'taboo' compels it to shut its eyes to a whole series of inexplicable and unintelligible phenomena, deprives it of wholeness and unity, and as a result brings it about that we have no science but have sciences.
                                                  P.D. Ouspensky in A New Model of the Universe
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
-George Bernard Shaw

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
-George Bernard Shaw

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw

Consider these predictions about the future from the History Channel's "Time Lab 2000":

At the end of the 19th century, Patent Commissioner Charles Doole (?) definitively stated: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" 
                              Harry Warner of Warner Brothers in 1927
"Man will not fly for 50 years."
                              Wilbur Wright
"Man will not reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."
                              Lee DeForest, inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1957
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