„Kant … discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.“

„Most events spring from causes equally small: we are unacquainted with them because most historians have been themselves ignorant of them, or have not had eyes capable of perceiving them. It is true, that, in this respect, the mind may repair their omissions; for the knowledge of certain principles easily compensates the lack of knowledge of certain facts.“

—  Claude Adrien Helvétius French philosopher 1715 - 1771

La plupart des évènements ont des causes aussi petites. Nous les ignorons, parce que la plupart des historiens les ont ignorées eux-mêmes, ou parce qu’ils n’ont pas eu d’yeux pour les appercevoir. Il est vrai qu’à cet égard l’esprit peut réparer leurs omissions : la connoissance de certains principes supplée facilement à la connoissance de certains faits.
Essay III, Chapter I
De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758)

„To what degree does it help us to change our life, or even to sense our existence, to really evaluate “why?” I think those questions cannot be escaped. Sometimes in history it’s more hidden; somewhere these can be very personal and individual questions. But in certain times and certain places, your existence has to be associated with other people’s situations. You have to make a reaction to the living conditions. It’s not avoidable. You cannot just be blind about what is happening there. Such is the case in China.“

—  Ai Weiwei Chinese concept artist 1957

2000-09, Escape from Propaganda, 2009

„It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass“

—  J. B. Bury Irish historian and freethinker 1861 - 1927

Introduction<!-- pp. 3-4 -->
The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (1921)
Kontext: Science has been advancing without interruption during the last three of four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt, they have always found ways to advance further. But what assurance have we that they will not come up against impassable barriers?... Take biology or astronomy. How can we be sure that some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are exhausted... It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall not reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass.

„Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.“

—  Aristotle, buch Posterior Analytics

I. 13, 78a.22
Posterior Analytics

„Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sorts of question.“

—  Nigel Warburton British author and lecturer 1962

Philosophy : the basics (Fifth Edition, 2013), Introduction

„Although it is admitted that certain differences cannot be verified by experiment, we should not infer from this fact that they do not exist. …we are accused of having confused subjective inability with objective indeterminacy.“

—  Hans Reichenbach American philosopher 1891 - 1953

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

„The view from complexity claims that we cannot know complex things completely… modest positions are inescapable… We can increase the knowledge we have of a certain [complex] system, but this knowledge is limited… The fact that our knowledge is limited is not a disaster, it is a condition for knowledge. Limits enable knowledge.“

—  Paul Cilliers South African philosopher 1956 - 2011

Paul Cilliers (2005: 263) as quoted in: Vikki Bell (2007) Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory. p. 8

„Theories are only verified hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best, but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed.“

—  Claude Bernard French physiologist 1813 - 1878

Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

„It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.“

—  Friedrich Engels German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher 1820 - 1895

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm (1886)

„It's a great question about what is our mind. Undoubtedly a creation of our brain.“

—  Jerzy Vetulani Polish scientist 1936 - 2017

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

„Equality gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer… a = a and a = b are obviously statements of differing cognitive value; a = a holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labeled analytic, while statements of the form a = b often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori.“

—  Gottlob Frege, Über Sinn und Bedeutung

The discovery that the rising sun is not new every morning, but always the same, was one of the most fertile astronomical discoveries. Even to-day the identification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now if we were to regard equality as a relation between that which the names 'a' and 'b' designate, it would seem that a = b could not differ from a = a (i.e. provided a = b is true). A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing to itself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but to no other thing.
As cited in: M. Fitting, Richard L. Mendelsoh (1999), First-Order Modal Logic, p. 142. They called this Frege's Puzzle.
Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892

„From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life.“

—  Miguel de Unamuno 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher 1864 - 1936

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

„Mathematical knowledge may, just like our scientific knowledge, be deep and broad, it may be subtle and wonderfully explanatory, it may be uncontroversially accepted; but it cannot be certain.“

—  David Deutsch, buch The Fabric of Reality

Quelle: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 10

„I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.“

—  Max Planck German theoretical physicist 1858 - 1947

Interview in 'The Observer' (25 January 1931), p.17, column 3

„Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.“

—  Roger Bacon, buch Opus Majus

Opus Majus, c. 1267
Quelle: Robert Belle Burke (2002) The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2. p. 583

„The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.“

—  John Cage American avant-garde composer 1912 - 1992

„I simply don't think it is reasonable to use IQ tests to produce results of questionable value, which may then serve to justify racists in their own minds and to help bring about the kinds of tragedies we have already witnessed earlier in this century.“

—  Isaac Asimov American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction and popular … 1920 - 1992

"Alas, All Human" in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1979
General sources

„Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.“

—  Robin McKinley, buch Sunshine

Quelle: Sunshine

„Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

226
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire