Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

- Ian Hacking

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

- Ian Hacking

I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'

- Ian Hacking

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

- Ian Hacking

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

- Ian Hacking

I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.

- Ian Hacking

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

- Ian Hacking