Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
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"Variations on a Philosopher" in Themes and Variations (1950)Aldous Huxley
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...as nature has graven her image and that of her Author on all things, they almost all partake of her double infinity. Thus we see that all the sciences are infinite in the extent of their researches. For who doubts that geometry, for instance, has an infinite infinity of problems to solve? They are also infinite in the multitude and fineness of their premises; for it is clear that those which are put forward as ultimate are not self-supporting, but are based on others which, again having others for their support, do not permit of finality. ...Of these two Infinites of science, that of greatness is the most palpable, and hence a few persons have pretended to know all things. ...the infinitely little is the least obvious. Philosophers have much oftener claimed to have reached it, and it is here they have all stumbled. ...we need no less capacity for attaining the Nothing than the All. Infinite capacity is required for both, and it seems to me that whoever shall have understood the ultimate principles of being might also attain to the knowledge of the Infinite. The one depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes meet and reunite by force of distance, and find each other in God, and in God alone. 72
Blaise Pascal
Just as human beings have an almost infinite power to destroy, they also possess an enormous capacity to learn, to grow and to create. … Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General, at the UN’s Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, 29 January 2007.
Shashi Tharoor
To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing — any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism: human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for, equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
To regard human beings as tools — as instruments — for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker — they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.
Alfred Korzybski
Huxley, Aldous
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