Science & Tech Quote by Hans Eysenck

Eysenck draws a bright line between the social arts of persuasion and the supposed hard floor of reality. The opening concession to "tact and diplomacy" is strategic: he grants politics and business their normal operating systems (maneuver, compromise, face-saving) so he can isolate science as an ethical outlier. Then he lands the clincher: "only one thing matters". The sentence is built like a lab protocol - narrow the variables, control the noise, report the measurement. It's a rhetorical purification ritual.

The subtext is less pristine. Eysenck isn't just defending facts; he's policing the boundary of who gets to speak for them. Declaring that diplomacy has no place in science is a way of warning against consensus-by-comfort, the kind of "agreement" produced by institutional pressure, professional politeness, or ideological fear. In that sense it reads as a rebuke to scientific communities that behave like parliaments.

Context matters because Eysenck was a combative figure in psychology, a field perpetually anxious about its status as a "real" science. His line performs a defensive maneuver: if psychology is to be taken seriously, it must sound like physics - indifferent to reputations, politics, and feelings. The irony, of course, is that science is practiced by humans inside institutions, with funding, careers, journals, and rivalries. Facts may be the final court of appeal, but the courtroom runs on rhetoric. Eysenck's absolutism works because it's aspirational: it names the ideal scientists want to believe they serve, even when they don't always live up to it.