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"What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
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"At the end of all spiritual paths, there lies only a cold graveyard; the path of science is the only path that may give you something better than this!"

"Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination."

"It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence."

"What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us."

"When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for animal researchers is to come up with tests that can distinguish between the two."

"We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture."

"We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."

"Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something."

"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death."

"But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting."

"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."

"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."

"The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser."

"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."

"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."
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