It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but … - Wilfred Trotter

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Some of my most outrageous nights- I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I'm famous for partying! The ultimate party- if it's any good- you can't remember it.

Wilfred Trotter

It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.

Hard Work, Ideas, Inability, Lying, Nonsense, Opinion

Same Author Quotes

The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain.

Altogether, Hoping, Ideas, Mercy, Science, Truth

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.

Body, Ideas, Known, Mind, Science

If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Argue, Begun, Honestly, Ideas, Science, Watches

It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the human mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man distinguished in one or even more departments of science, is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.

Distinguished, Flatly, Men, Nothing, Practice, Thinking

The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer, exist in an exact sense only in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore; states even approaching them cannot be reached without a moral and emotional effort most of us cannot or will not make.

Effort, Emotional, Science, Sense, Unprejudiced