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Quotes & Sayings About Pseudoscience

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Top Pseudoscience Quotes

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Gibbons

Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous. — Paul Gibbons

Pseudoscience Quotes By Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I bought it, I read it, and I heeded its advice. I remain unabducted. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Pseudoscience Quotes By Isaac Asimov

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket. — Isaac Asimov

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By K. Lee Lerner

Pseudoscience often relies on a witches' brew of scientific terms (e.g. "wavelength," "energy fields," "vibrations") half-baked into simplistic metaphors that do not correspond with testable reality. In some cases, pseudoscience simply relies on language that is deliberately vague and poorly defined to deceive. While outright lunacy is almost always easy to spot, the most dangerous of pseudoscientific meanderings are those filled with scientific terminology that, even for experts, can initially be daunting and impressive. Upon dissection, however, the terminology is invariably found to be misused, or used in a context far from accepted understanding. However convincing and artful, however much we may even wish the conclusions to be true, monuments built in such shifting sands cannot withstand the inevitable tests of time. — K. Lee Lerner

Pseudoscience Quotes By Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I'm a fan of the planets in any combination. When I was born, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon were all in the sky. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Peter J. Carroll

The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface. — Peter J. Carroll

Pseudoscience Quotes By Richard Adams

Sheep used to have wings. One flew into the sky and all the others followed. They took their wings off while feeding in the warm sun but the wind blew away their wings so they couldn't fly anymore. They had to return to earth by drifting to where the sky curves down and touches the land, and then walk round the long way.. i like that.. — Richard Adams

Pseudoscience Quotes By Eric Bronson

Racism watching is a puzzle solving activity and often involves debunking pseudo-science. The investigator must try to figure out what makes people believe in weird ideas. As Stieg said in an interview, 'Fifty years later, people still believe in this; the whole Neo-Nazi movement. There is absolutely no sense in this. They do it contrary to everything science tells us. Contrary to human goodness or altruism, contrary to rational thinking. And this is fascinating, why? — Eric Bronson

Pseudoscience Quotes By John Allen Paulos

Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence. — John Allen Paulos

Pseudoscience Quotes By Ivar Giaever

Is climate change pseudoscience? If I'm going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely. — Ivar Giaever

Pseudoscience Quotes By David McRaney

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards. — David McRaney

Pseudoscience Quotes By Judy Byington

In the far reaches of her brain a storehouse of demeaning events evidently opened a door for Extra Sensory Perception experiences to enter. — Judy Byington

Pseudoscience Quotes By James D. Watson

Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage. — James D. Watson

Pseudoscience Quotes By James J. Kilpatrick

Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway. — James J. Kilpatrick

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Science and mathematics [are] much more compelling and exciting than the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as 'night walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.' But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer universe, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder. And it has the additional and important virtue-to whatever extent the word has any meaning-of being true. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By K. Lee Lerner

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

Pseudoscience Quotes By A.E. Samaan

You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement. — A.E. Samaan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Rudolf Carnap

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems. — Rudolf Carnap

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Richard Feynman

If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an 'oomph,' this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, 'Well, that is the funny behavior of the 'oomph. — Richard Feynman

Pseudoscience Quotes By Mark Bowden

Which brings me to the Hubble Space Telescope's newest images. If it's wonder that you're looking for, and mystery, don't just scan the photographs. Stop and think about them. Try to imagine the scale. The Earth is just a speck of dust on one distant whirling tentacle of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains billions of stars. A 'collision' of galaxies seems unimaginably large - and yet it is something scientists long ago imagined ... The imaginings of pseudoscience are feeble by comparison. — Mark Bowden

Pseudoscience Quotes By Mark Steyn

Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that "in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis". — Mark Steyn

Pseudoscience Quotes By Craig Ferguson

Pseudoscience describes theories that sound like science but are actually just made up, like aromatherapy or biorhythms or love. — Craig Ferguson

Pseudoscience Quotes By Richard Dawkins

Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'. — Richard Dawkins

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Thagard

In conclusion, I would like to say why I think the question of what constitutes a pseudoscience is important. Unlike the logical positivists, I am not grinding an anti-metaphysical ax, and unlike Popper, I am not grinding an anti-Freudian or anti-Marxian one. My concern is social: society faces the twin problems of lack of public concern with the advancement of science, and lack of public concern with the important ethical issues now arising in science and technology ... One reason for this dual lack of concern is the wide popularity of pseudoscience and the occult among the general public. Elucidation of how science differs from pseudoscience is the philosophical side of an attempt to overcome public neglect of genuine science. — Paul Thagard

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Friedrich Hayek

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. — Friedrich Hayek

Pseudoscience Quotes By Phil Plait

Pseudoscience is like a virus. At low levels, it's no big deal, but when it reaches a certain threshold it becomes sickening. — Phil Plait

Pseudoscience Quotes By Aleksandra Mir

"Hello" is pseudoscience. The only smart way to read it is not to believe in it, not to trust it, or to put yourself in it and imagine what's out there that you haven't been told or seen. — Aleksandra Mir

Pseudoscience Quotes By Robert T. Pennock

Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say.
A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism. — Robert T. Pennock

Pseudoscience Quotes By Ben Goldacre

Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer. — Ben Goldacre

Pseudoscience Quotes By Samuel Homola

Chiropractic, which celebrated its centennial in 1995, is a curious mixture of science and pseudoscience, sense and nonsense. Much of it is based on the theory that misaligned spinal bones produce nerve interference that causes disease. Many chiropractors claim that correcting these misalignments ("subluxations") can restore health and that regular spinal adjustments are essential to maintain it. — Samuel Homola

Pseudoscience Quotes By Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Pseudoscience Quotes By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism. Pseudoscience came with a collection of idealistic nerds who tried to create a tailor-made society, the epitome of which is the central planner. Economics was the most likely candidate for such use of science; you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Pseudoscience Quotes By Wendy Kaminer

The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences and the growing belief by Americans
34 percent of them
in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason. — Wendy Kaminer

Pseudoscience Quotes By Jeff Hawkins

The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy. — Jeff Hawkins

Pseudoscience Quotes By Isaac Asimov

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people ... If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with. — Isaac Asimov

Pseudoscience Quotes By Anonymous

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Sceptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced. — Anonymous

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Gibbons

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake. — Paul Gibbons

Pseudoscience Quotes By Michel Foucault

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated. — Michel Foucault

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance
betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Jay Griffiths

I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate. — Jay Griffiths

Pseudoscience Quotes By Hermann Kolbe

The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up by pseudo scientists from the lumber room of human fallacies, and like a trollop, newly attired in elegant dress and make-up, is smuggled into respectable company, to which she does not belong. — Hermann Kolbe

Pseudoscience Quotes By Tim Minchin

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine. — Tim Minchin

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Gibbons

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program. — Paul Gibbons

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Gibbons

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste — Paul Gibbons

Pseudoscience Quotes By Liu Cixin

Take those frauds who practice pseudoscience - do you know who they're most afraid of?"

"Scientists, of course."

"No. Many of the best scientists can be fooled by pseudoscience and sometimes devote their lives to it. But pseudoscience is afraid of one particular type of people who are very hard to fool: stage magicians. In fact, many pseudoscience hoaxes were exposed by stage magicians. — Liu Cixin

Pseudoscience Quotes By Ben Goldacre

I'd like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that 'Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.' What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out off my arsehole instead?
Thank you. Anton. — Ben Goldacre

Pseudoscience Quotes By Franz Cumont

After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige. — Franz Cumont

Pseudoscience Quotes By Paul Gibbons

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience. — Paul Gibbons

Pseudoscience Quotes By Rael

All that happens in the human brain is but the result of electro-chemical reactions. Be it of love, hate, of pleasure, of suffering, of imagination, or all other states of mind, sentiment or sickness; the process depends in every case on the chemical reactions produced in the interior of the brain, and the resulting electrical impulses or messages, be they visual, auditory, based on memory, or an interpretation of new events based on elements that one has in the memory. — Rael

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Jane Jacobs

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. — Jane Jacobs

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Jonathan Maberry

It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science. — Jonathan Maberry

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Judy Byington

When explicit thinking patterns were in charge, light waves of particular lengths were thought to stimulate Jenny's optical nerve, changing hue of her eye color. — Judy Byington

Pseudoscience Quotes By Austin L. Hughes

A falsifiable theory is one that makes a specific prediction about what results are supposed to occur under a set of experimental conditions, so that the theory might be falsified by performing the experiment and comparing predicted to actual results. A theory or explanation that cannot be falsified falls outside the domain of science. For example, Freudian psychoanalysis, which does not make specific experimental predictions, is able to revise its theory to match any observations, in order to avoid rejecting the theory altogether. By this reckoning, Freudianism is a pseudoscience, a theory that purports to be scientific but is in fact immune to falsification. In contrast, for example, Einstein's theory of relativity made predictions (like the bending of starlight around the sun) that were novel and specific, and provided opportunities to disprove the theory by direct experimental observation.
[The folly of scientism] — Austin L. Hughes

Pseudoscience Quotes By Kim Stanley Robinson

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Pseudoscience Quotes By Carl Sagan

Telepathy' literally means to feel at a distance, just as 'telephone' is to hear at a distance and 'television' is to see at a distance. The word suggests the communication not of thoughts but of feelings, emotions. Around a quarter of all Americans believe they've experienced something like telepathy. People who know each other very well, who live together, who are practised in one another's feeling tones, associations and thinking styles can often anticipate what the partner will say. This is merely the usual five senses plus human empathy, sensitivity and intelligence in operation. It may feel extrasensory, but it's not at all what's intended by the word 'telepathy'. If something like this were ever conclusively demonstrated, it would, I think, have discernible physical causes -perhaps electrical currents in the brain. Pseudoscience, rightly or wrongly labelled, is by no means the same thing as the supernatural, which is by definition something somehow outside of Nature. — Carl Sagan

Pseudoscience Quotes By Samir Okasha

The failure of Popper's demarcation criterion throws up an important question. Is it actually possible to find some common feature shared by all the things we call 'science...'? It may be that they share some fixed set of features that define what it is to be science, but it may not.... If so, a simple criterion for demarcating science from pseudo-science is unlikely to be found. — Samir Okasha

Pseudoscience Quotes By Tom Cruise

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience ... You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do ... Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, you don't even -you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is. — Tom Cruise

Pseudoscience Quotes By Christopher Marshall

Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscienceChristopher Marshall

Pseudoscience Quotes By Ludwig Von Mises

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. — Ludwig Von Mises