After a great war, history is written by the victors and legends develop which glorify them. - Werner Heisenberg

[E]ven in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions. ...[I]t is well known that the concept of infinity leads to contradictions... but it would be practically impossible to construct... mathematics without this concept.

The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law.

[U]ncomprimising belief carries much more weight than some special philosophical notions... [T]he great majority... can scarcely have any well-founded judgement concerning the correctness of certain important general ideas or doctrines. ...[T]he word "belief" can for this majority not mean "perceiving the truth of something" but... only... as "taking this as the basis for life." ...[T]his second kind of belief is much firmer... much more fixed... it can persist even against immediate contradicting experience... not... shaken by added scientific knowledge... sometimes... to the point where it seems completely absurd, and ends... only with the death of the believer. Science and history can teach us that this... may become a great danger... [S]uch belief has always belonged to the great forces in human history.