Pseudoscience Quotes

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

“deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, 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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“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, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

“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, The Plague Dogs

“Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33
TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.”
― David L. Calof

“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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Göring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33
Freyd: The term "multiple personality" itself assumes that there is "single personality" and there is evidence that no one ever displays a single personality.

TAT: The issue here is the extent of dissociation and amnesia and the extent to which these fragmentary aspects of personality can take executive control and control function. Sure, you and I have different parts to our mind, there's no doubt about that, but I don't lose time to mine they can't come out in the middle of a lecture and start acting 7 years old. I'm very much in the camp that says that we all are multi-minds, but the difference between you and me and a multiple is pretty tangible.

Freyd: Those are clearly interesting questions, but that area and the clinical aspects of dissociation and multiple personalities is beyond anything the Foundation is actively...

TAT: That's a real problem. Let me tell you why that's a problem. Many of the people that have been alleged to have "false memory syndrome" have diagnosed dissociative disorders. It seems to me the fact that you don't talk about dissociative disorders is a little dishonest, since many people whose lives have been impacted by this movement are MPD or have a dissociative disorder. To say, "Well, we ONLY know about repression but not about dissociation or multiple personalities" seems irresponsible.

Freyd: Be that as it may, some of the scientific issues with memory are clear. So if we can just stick with some things for a moment; one is that memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted no matter how long ago or recent.

TAT: You weigh the recollected testimony of an alleged perpetrator more than the alleged victim's. You're saying, basically, if the parents deny it, that's another notch for disbelief.

Freyd: If it's denied, certainly one would want to check things. It would have to be one of many factors that are weighed -- and that's the problem with these issues -- they are not black and white, they're very complicated issues.”
― David L. Calof

“Una de las lecciones más tristes de la historia es ésta: si se está sometido a un engaño demasiado tiempo, se tiende a rechazar cualquier prueba de que es un engaño.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33
Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . .

TAT: Please do.

Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome:

1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more;

2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators;

3. If there is denial by the entire family;

4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia;

5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and;

6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology.

Are these the kind of things you were asking for?

TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome."

Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy.

TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works!

Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved.

TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told.”
― David L. Calof

“A sedução do maravilhoso embota nossas faculdades críticas.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Experimentation on humans is the prototypical activity of totalitarianism. It is the ultimate submission of reality to the pseudoscientific ideological fiction.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“When Copernicus and Galileo discovered that the planets orbit the Sun rather than the Earth, and Newton discovered the laws that govern their motion, astrology became extremely implausible. Why should the positions of other planets against the background sky as seen from Earth have any correlations with the macromolecules on a minor planet that call themselves intelligent life? Yet this is what astrology would have us to believe.”
― Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell

“It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science.”
― Jonathan Maberry, Dead of Night

“Superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love

“AI Con (The Sonnet)

Everybody is concerned about psychics conning people,
How 'bout the billionaires who con people using science!
Con artists come in all shapes and sizes,
Some use barnum statements, others artificial intelligence.
Most scientists speak up against only the little frauds,
But not the big frauds who support their livelihood.
Am I not afraid to be blacklisted by the big algorithms!
Is the sun afraid, its light will offend some puny hoods!
I come from the soil, I'll die struggling in the soil.
My needs are less, hence my integrity is dangerous.
I am here to show this infantile species how to grow up.
I can't be bothered by the fragility of a few spoiled brats.
Reason and fiction both are fundamental to build a civilization.
Neither is the problem, the problem is greed and self-absorption.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“There is no law of attraction, there is only law of action.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“I Am A Scientist (Sonnet 1026)

You may believe in psychics,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
You may believe in astrology,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
You may believe in tarot and reiki,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
You may believe in energy healing,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
You may believe in angels and spirits,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
You may believe in life after death,
I don't need to, I am a scientist.
So long as you don't practice hate,
I stand here with my hand stretched out.
Will you hold it despite differences,
Or do you hate me for voicing reason out loud!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Her Insan Ailem: Everyone is Family, Everywhere is Home

“False Memory Syndrome is sometimes described as a modern day pseudo-scientific version of the Oedipus complex – a way of dismissing the account of an abuse victim as fantasy, that allows our society to avoid dealing with the very uncomfortable possibility that the vast majority of allegations of sexual abuse are true.”
― Ashley Conway

“By far, the oldest of the claptrap philosophies of mankind is astrology.”
― James Randi, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions Publisher: Prometheus Books

“Just because a supposed finding's hurled beneath the banner of 'science' does not mean it's of peak reliance, and in theory any layperson will tell you that obvious fact. It is in practice that the word itself, 'science', rings like a dinner bell for those hungry to expel religious dogmas.”
― Criss Jami

“As for politicians who demand you follow the science, if in the opposite direction you also follow the money, you might find about nine times out of ten that the two paths are conjoined at the end.”
― Criss Jami

“the 'Aryan' race theory... claims that the North Europeoids originated in ancient days in India and Iran...”
― Mikhail Nesturkh, Ras-ras Umat Manusia

“Fowler's philosophy [of phrenology] is all about the possibility and real hope of change. Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant; if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one's life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways and their selves... Bad actions became the correctable result of improper development, rather than machinations of some cloven-footed prat with a fiery pitchfork. What Fowler holds out is nothung less than the promise of redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last, Fowler tears aside his scientific raiments, and reveals what he has been all along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? "[Let us] redouble our efforts for... that high and holy destiny hereafter as such by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION!" Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivisim.”
― Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

“Superstition is not divinity, any more than phrenology is brain science. Conspiracy is not enlightenment, any more than astrology is astrophysics.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Superstition is not divinity,
Phrenology is not brain science.
Astrology is not astrophysics,
Conspiracy is not enlightenment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Spirituality is supposed to be an act of self awareness – an act of self-discovery - instead it has become a domain of new-age superstitions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“I used to use 'manifest' as taking charge, till I realized, it evoked new-age stupidity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Divine Refugee

“[...] The statement "Botticelli's Birth of Venus is stunning", for starters, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, because there is no experiment that might show this statement to be false. Parallax method and equations conventionally determined that the average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384 400 Km (238 855 miles). Now, if we were to conduct hands-on investigation for its validation or an audit to demonstrate its falsification, direct testing of such a distance measure would require a scientist to physically travel the space with a giant ruler to calculate the scale between the two points. [...] The problem that scientific certainty is a myth still struggles to brush past the academic prejudice of most scientists who are green on critical analysis for its alleged pedagogical irrelevance.”
― Vincent Bozzino, Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide