As Voltaire once remarked, 'It is the privilege of the real genius, especially one who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity.' The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. For that reason there has been, ever since, a watershed in understanding between those who have taken his work on board and those who have not. For a good many of the problems he uncovered, the solutions he put forward have not stood the test of time, but his uncovering of the problems remains the most illuminating thing a philosopher has ever done. Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since.
-- Bryan Magee
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this---what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as 'mankind's need for metaphysics.'
-- Bryan Magee
Again, the idea is to sacrifice hypotheses rather than human beings or valuable resources(including time). A society [or corporation] that goes about things in this way will be more successful in achieving the aims of its policy-makers [or managers] than one in which they forbid critical discussion of their policies, or forbid critical comment on the practical consequences of those policies. Suppression of criticism means that more mistakes than otherwise will go unperceived in the formulation of policy, and also that after mistaken policies have been implemented they will be persisted in for longer before being altered or abandoned.
-- Bryan Magee
[when I first went up to Oxford] I had no conception of philosophy as an intellectual discipline, and not the remotest idea of what it was capable of in the work of a thinker like Kant. At that level it does, I now believe, stand close to great art among the most valuable and important of human concerns, and for a similar reason: both are truth-seeking activities pursued at the deepest level that human beings are capable of penetrating to. Both are trying to see into the ultimate nature of things, the ultimate mystery of existence; and if they fail it is only at the limits of human understanding that they fail. As Schopenhauer put it, the philosopher is doing in abstracto what the artist is doing in concreto. The philosopher has no recourse but to articulate his findings in concepts, and it may be that from the ineluctable generality of concepts it follows that philosophy cannot bite as deep as art can, but at the same time there are things that it can do that art cannot. When Iris Murdoch said, "For better and worse art goes deeper than philosophy," she was right to imply that there are some respects in which philosophy surpasses art, and also right to imply that it comes short of it overall.
-- Bryan Magee
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