Neurath Quotes & Sayings

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. — Otto Neurath

Neurath asked Dodd whether the United States "did not have a Jewish problem" of its own. "You know, of course," Dodd said, "that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life." He added that some of his peers in Washington had told him confidentially that "they appreciated the difficulties of the Germans in this respect but that they did not for a moment agree with the method of solving the problem which so often ran into utter ruthlessness. — Erik Larson

Modern man receives a large part of his knowledge and general education by way of pictorial impressions, illustrations, photographs, films. Daily newspapers bring more pictures from year to year. In addition, the advertising business operates with optical signals as well as representations. Exhibitions and museums are indeed offspring of this visual hustle. — Otto Neurath

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components. — Otto Neurath

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. — Willard Van Orman Quine

To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures. — Otto Neurath

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat
a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. — Willard Van Orman Quine

He who knows what best to omit is the best teacher. — Otto Neurath