Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Imre Lakatos

It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
Imre Lakatos

If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
Imre Lakatos

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
Imre Lakatos

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.
Imre Lakatos

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
Imre Lakatos

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
Imre Lakatos