My cast of mind is a very bad handicap in this age of the committee. My true thoughts when I sit on a committee are so grotesquely at variance with t… - Fred Hoyle

The correct procedure I am sure it is to learn by doing, not by being told what to do. The notion that one can learn by attending a course of lectures is as absurd as the notion that the way to learn to ride a bicycle would be to hire someone to ride it for you, and to sit hour after hour watching him. The only reason for attending a lecture is to acquire hints as to the right method of tackling some particular problem or other. And this would be almost unnecessary in a properly designed and graded system of examples.

Now do you see my point?"
"I'm beginning to see through a glass darkly. You mean that the mental make-up of a leading politician is likely to be such that he couldn't dream it possible that anyone could find the prospect of becoming a dictator wholly unpalatable."
"Yes, I can see it all, Chris," Leicester grinned. "Graft everywhere, executions just for the laughs, no wife or daughter safe.

It isn’t the Universe that’s following our logic, it’s we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe.