Unavoidable Quotes - page 3
Among the various paradigmatic changes in science and mathematics in this century, one such change concerns the concept of uncertainty. In science, this change has been manifested by a gradual transition from the traditional view, which insists that uncertainty is undesirable in science and should be avoided by all possible means, to an alternative view, which is tolerant of uncertainty and insists that science cannot avoid it. According to the traditional view, science should strive for certainty in all its manifestations (precision, specificity, sharpness, consistency, etc.); hence, uncertainty (imprecision, nonspecificity, vagueness, inconsistency, etc.) is regarded as unscientific. According to the alternative (or modem) view, uncertainty is considered essential to science; it is not only an unavoidable plague, but it has, in fact, a great utility.
George Klir
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines... I change everyone's coiffure - except those that please me - and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.
Margaret Caroline Anderson