Magicians from the United States

"Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision."

"That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity."

"Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people."

"Penn turned to me […] "Do I have to call him [Prince Charles] 'Your Majesty' or any of that shit? […] And what about bowing? I have to bow? We don't bow in America. […] I won't get put in the Tower of London or anything?" […] I reassured him on these points. No Highnessing, no kowtowing. At last the Prince reaches Penn, who immediately falls almost prostrate to the floor. "Your Majesty Highness, Your Royal Sir…" and so on and so forth, babbling like a gibbon on speed. The Prince passes on to me and whoever was the other side of me without turning a hair. Seen it all before. After he had gone, I watched Penn, an enormous man, crouching on the floor, rolling about, beating the planks of the stage, sobbing, stuffing his fist in his mouth and moaning up to the fly-tower: "Why did I do that? What came over me? What power do they have? I betrayed my country!""

"We can't start getting picky because we've got enough food; that's just self-centered and racist. Unless you and yours are starving, you need to shut the fuck up!"

"I've always wanted to make the world a more rational place. I'm still working on it."

"A guy called up, and in his lead, he said, "We've talked before. I used to be with US but now I'm for SELF." And I was like, "I guess we know everything now, don't we?" … I kind of laughed and I went, "I guess a lot of people are like that." And he paused and went, "Uhhh… what?" And I said, "Oh, nothing.""

"It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza. … God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways."

"Take some time and put the Bible on your summer reading list. Try and stick with it cover to cover. Not because it teaches history; we've shown you it doesn't. Read it because you'll see for yourself what the Bible is all about. It sure isn't great literature. If it were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and some quotable phrases, but there's no plot, no structure, there's a tremendous amount of filler, and the characters are painfully one-dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition, and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists — and nothin will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible."

"Freedom means the right to be stupid."

"If you can just convince the dope people that the gun people are right and the gun people that the dope people are right, we could actually live in a lot more freedom."

"Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse. It's because you get older, your responsibilities are different. Now I'm taking care of children instead of being a child. It makes the world look scarier. That happens to everyone."

"My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them."

"Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to."

"And I've always said, you know, that I don't respect people that don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell — or not getting eternal life, or whatever — and you think that, "Well, it's not really worth tellin' 'em this, because it would make it socially awkward", and atheists who think that people shouldn't proselytize, "Just leave me alone. Keep your religion to yourself"... How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it —that truck was bearing down on you — there's a certain point where I tackle you, and this is more important than that."

"I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do"

"I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God." Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day."

"Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

"I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less."

"Interviewer: Are there any groups you won’t go after? Penn: We haven’t tackled Scientology [in Penn & Teller: Bullshit!] because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tackled Islam because we have families. Interviewer: Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back … Penn: Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific."

"Atheism is the only real hope against terrorism."

"Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Here's a really blunt question: would the world be a better or a worse place if a billion Muslims became evangelical Christians tomorrow? Penn: [long pause] Everything else being equal, I think "yes". Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Then we agree. Penn: The argument is made by me that the celebration of faith, the glorification of faith, and faith being defined as The Bible kind of does as belief without proof, is not something that I feel is good to celebrate. To answer the question about evil, I always find that evil takes responsibility away. I want to have—whether it’s me or whether it's a criminal—I want to have full responsibility of my mistakes. And I think when you have this image, whether it's the Disney image of devil Pluto and angel Pluto on your shoulders, pulling you one direction or another, I think that idea of evil is an idea that is anti-responsibility."

"My friend Richard Feynman said, "I don't know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill's Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts. "I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know." I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don't know. I try to remember to say "I don't know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn't always work, but I try."

"What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist — I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe. And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me."

"It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint."

"Government is force — literally, not figuratively. I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone. The fact that the majority thinks they have a way to get something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don't want to pay for it. If you have to use a gun, I don't believe you really know jack. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid."

"You don't have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is "I don't know.""

"Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism. Reading the Bible means starting at "In the beginning..." and throwing it down with disgust at "...the grace of the lord Jesus be with all. Amen." I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists."

"Atheists are also morally obligated to tell the truth as we see it. We should preach and proselytize too. We need to help believers. Someone who believes in god is wasting big parts of his or her life, holding back science and love, and giving "moral" support to dangerous extremists. If you believe something, you must share it; it's one of the ways we all learn about truth."

"If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again."

"The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you."

"I love people. And I think if you take the 7 billion people on the planet and you round it off, about 7 billion of them are good. To find bad people is really difficult. Not people doing bad things, but really bad people who get up in the morning and say, How can I fuck people up? That’s a really rare thing. Misguided, you know, mistaken, but I just can’t understand how this view of humanity that all we want to do is horrible things to each other and it’s just this belief in something else that stops us. And that that is what you see over and over again through the Bible. There’s reward and punishment but there’s no – I mean, nothing feels better than helping someone out. I mean, there’s nothing better, nothing better in the world than someone whose life was fucked up and you do a little something and now their life isn’t. I mean, you can talk about the joy of sex, hedonistic joys of food, and you can talk about the joy with your children, but man, someone is going through a hard time and you help them out, man you feel good for months."

"There are really good sociobiological reasons for why we evolved to cooperate. It really is good for all of us. You can be a hard ass and just run common sense, you know, what is the most effective way for people to interact and you do better if you treat people well, you just do. And on top of that the whole world does better if you treat people well. It works out on any level."

"If you just want to help people out you end up being a good person. I mean there’s every single kind of horrible self-help book will tell you if you’re feeling down and you’re feeling depressed just go help someone out and it’s a cliché, you wouldn’t even say it it’s so embarrassing, except it happens to be true."

"The problem is, I know Trump, so my optimism has been squashed like a baby bird … Everything bad I had to say about him, I said to his face. … I think he’s very good, very compelling on that show [Celebrity Apprentice] … I really like him because of his absence of filters. I really like the glimpse we get into the human heart we get when someone loses their filters … If he weren’t running for president, you’d be seeing essays from me about how much I learned from Donald Trump and how much I loved being on the show … I’m feeling so, so, so guilty, because I feel like, along with millions of other people, I played right into this. The cynicism of the Clintons, the careful, tightrope walk of all politicians, forced me, as an atheist, to get down on my knees and pray that someone would come along with some kind of authenticity … Well, someone called my bluff, goddamn it. … I’m a pure and utter peacenik. I want a president who sings the praises of people, sings the praises of peace and sings the praises of working together for a great country … Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have laughed about waterboarding … If you told me right now I could have another eight years of Obama, I would not hesitate to grab at it. … He is unquestionably good and unquestionably smarter than I am, which is putting the bar pretty low. I want a president that is kinder, smarter and more measured than me."

"I have written and spoken and joked with friends the meanest, cruelest, most hateful things that could ever been said by me, have been said about the Clintons. I loathe them. I disagree with Hillary Clinton on just about everything there is to disagree with a person about. If it comes down to Trump and Hillary, I will put a Hillary Clinton sticker on my fucking car."

"Someone who is paying attention can do the same thing that Trump is doing with hate, and do it with love, and become president … That’s kind of beautiful. There’s nothing more optimistic than that. … Donald Trump does, when it comes right down to it, fuck up everything … He fucks up his casinos. He fucks up his buildings.... Maybe he’ll fuck up his campaign before he fucks up the country."

"For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problem has been too many calories, too much information. We have to adjust, and I believe we will really fast. I also believe it will be wicked ugly while we’re adjusting."

"I have nothing good to say about Donald Trump as president."

"Trump, who never showed the slightest glimpse of humility."

"[Y]ou cannot have community, you cannot have love unless you have a shared reality. And anything that comes from within, any revelation that comes from within by definition can't be shared. So what science did for us mostly was science gave us a reality that we could share and talk about. So if I feel the presence of my dead mother with me that's personal; that's poetic. But if I'm going to actually talk about what death means we have to go with things that we've proven. And proof has been given such a hard cold kind of connotation; whereas another way to say proof is just something you can share. It's another way to say love! If I believe there's a God in the universe and I can't prove it, I have said nothing to the community. If I think there's such a thing as black holes and I can give some evidence to that, that's a way of showing love for other people."

"I think if we share reality if we talk about things we can prove. The problem with talking about faith is you hit this wall. Why do you believe Jesus Christ is our Lord? Do you have evidence? "I feel it in my heart!" If you move "I feel it in my heart" out of the equation terrorism goes away -- completely goes away."

"I mean this is the part that no one ever talks about. If you go to the center of the Bible Belt, and you have a fundamentalist Christian judge and all the lawyers and all the jury are fundamentalist Christians, and they believe completely with their heart (and I'm not doubting them in any way), and someone gets on the witness stand and says "I killed my whole family because God told me to," it's astonishing to me that nobody goes, "Well let's look into that." You know we have guilty; we have not guilty; we have not guilty by reason of insanity; we do not have: not guilty because God told me to. And that's one of the things that I'm obsessed with in this book ["God No"] is the fact that not only do I not believe; but how can that judge read the Bible and see Abraham being willing to kill his son because God told him to, see burning bushes appearing to people, hear people dropping all their worldly possessions and going on to follow... how can they see all that, and then a woman who clearly believes that God told her to do something is completely and utterly dismissed? It's a nutty thing."

"We can argue forever about gun control — whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, including what the framers thought — but if we can’t agree that the shootings happened, then we can’t talk. I don’t think we’ve ever experienced a time in human history where there wasn’t a shared reality, even if that reality was false."

"... if you want to get heavy about it, you can say that every magic show is an exploration of how we determine what’s true."

"He's certainly not doing enough to help Palestinians. He's certainly not doing enough to help people over there suffering — which is also true for you, also true for me, true for everybody."

"... if you use the word “we,” and you’re not talking about eight billion people, fuck you."

"I’m not as nervous about being attacked for it as I am nervous about being wrong. As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.”"

"Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate."

"My ambitions were always, I think, fairly level-headed. I felt I could earn my living like my dad, who went from jail guard in a small town to supporting his family doing something he really loved — that was my goal. And when people talk to me and Teller about success, the day we were paying our bills doing a magic and juggling show, I was done."

"What I am doing is creating ephemera, and I believe that’s not only okay, that’s part of what makes it beautiful. I mean, I am aware it’s likely that in 30 years someone who is deeply interested in magic will dig up recordings of Fool Us and have things to learn, but that’s not what we’re really talking about. That’s excavating a piece of pottery."

"Luck is probability taken personally."

"The idea of mind-altering substances gives me the willies. Fill your tank with nitro, the car goes fast, sure, but not far."

"This I believe: I believe there is no god."

"Teller: Will you shut up! Homer Simpson: Hey, I thought you didn't talk. Teller: [nervously] Uh, I didn't mean to... it just slipped out. Oh god, now Penn's gonna beat me...I'm not the first Teller."

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

"I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven — time and again — to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and starves millions of us every day. He created cancer, viruses, and germs to invade and destroy our bodies as He sees fit, and uses them very effectively. In His wisdom, He directed those in charge to impede stem cell research so that such a powerful approach would not be available to us and He wouldn't have to strain the Divine Intellect to disarm that defense. We amuse Him as we flail about vainly trying to appease Him. I vote that we dump Him."

"… it's time for the opening lecture in Test Design 101: Consider: a woman claims to be a musician. You seat her at a piano and demand that she prove her claim. She cannot play the piano, and you conclude that her claim has been invalidated. Hardly. You see, the lady is a cellist…. You cannot challenge a claimant to do something they've never claimed they can do. That's why, at the JREF, we design a protocol only after the applicant has clearly stated (a) what they can do, (b) under what conditions, and (c) with what expected degree of success. And, the applicant must find the protocol appropriate, fair, agreeable, and adequate to prove their claim."

"Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way."

"Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."

"The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both."

"To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place -- not to mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in our world -- and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women. (This comprehensive statement was arrived at by examining the statutes of those seven states that have remained in the Dark Ages, so that I might satisfy their definitions of blasphemy.)"

"There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… the U.S. Patent Office handles an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them."

"Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they're gonna fool you, and then they do it."

"I regard Randi as a national treasure, and perhaps one of the remaining antidotes that may prevent the rotting of the American mind."

"Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $1,000,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe."

"We may disagree with Randi on certain points, but we ignore him at our peril."

"I found Randi likable and plausible; the only thing that bothered me was the sweeping and intense nature of his skepticism. He was obviously working from the premise that all paranormal phenomena, without exception, are fakes or delusions. He seemed to take it for granted that all of us — there were also two women present — shared his opinions, and he made jovial, disparaging remarks about psychics and other such weirdos. I began to get the uncomfortable feeling of a Jew who has accidentally walked into a Nazi meeting, or a Jehovah's Witness at a convention of militant atheists. As a supposedly scientific psychic investigator, Randi struck me as being oddly fixed in his opinions."

"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand."

"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby."

"Disloyalty in trusted servants is one of the most disheartening things that can happen to a public performer. But it must not be thought that I say this out of personal experience: for in the many years that I have been before the public my secret methods have been steadily shielded by the strict integrity of my assistants, most of whom have been with me for years. Only one man ever betrayed my confidence, and that only in a minor matter. But then, so far as I know, I am the only performer who ever pledged his assistant to secrecy, honor and allegiance under a notarial oath."

"Rosabelle — answer — tell — pray, answer — look — tell — answer, answer — tell."

"I'm tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me."

"I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That's what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the 'human fly' who scales the walls of the same building."

"Rosabel believe Not even eternity Can hold Houdini!"

"The effects produced at some of Houdini's "seances" were brilliant, and had he claimed the possession of genuine psychic powers he would have made a fortune."

"He had the essential masculine quality of courage to a supreme degree. Nobody has ever done and nobody in all human probability will ever do such reckless feats of daring. His whole life was one long succession of them."

"Houdini, the great transitional figure between "magical" acts and ingenious tricks, was at pains to explain that everything he did was a trick; he offered rewards, never collected, for any "supernatural" act he could not explain. The Amazing Randi carries on in the same tradition, bending spoons as easily as Uri Geller. And yet in Houdini's time, there were those who insisted he was doing real magic; how else could his effects be achieved? Daniel Mark Epstein wrote about the Houdini believers in a 1986 issue of the New Criterion, which I read as I read everything I can get my hands on about Houdini. The thing was, Houdini really did free himself from those fetters and chains and sealed trunks dropped into the river, and survived the Chinese Water Torture (an effect used prominently in The Prestige night after night). But there were those who argued his tricks were physically impossible, and thus must be supernatural."

"People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work."

"I'm not here for long, catch me or I go Houdini."

"As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens."

"A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?"

"I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life."

"Mathematical magic combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick."

"The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity."

"There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities.""

"In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance."

"Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all."

"I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph.D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do."

"There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry."

"Ever since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I've always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn't get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult."

"As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do."

"Ideologues of all persuasions think they know how the economy will respond to the Administration's strange mixture of Lafferism and monetarism. Indeed, their self-confidence is so vast, and their ability to rationalize so crafty, that one cannot imagine a scenario for the next few years, that they would regard as falsifying their dogma. The failure of any prediction can always be blamed on quirky political decisions or unforeseen historical events."

"The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse."

"Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine—in fact one shudders to imagine—a child of today reading and enjoying it."

"Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad."

"Bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. We see this happening now in the rapid rise of the religious right and how it has taken over large segments of the Republican Party."

"We know from polls how ignorant the general public is about science. Almost half of all adults in the United States now believe in astrology and in angels and demons, and that we are being observed by aliens and UFOs who frequently abduct humans. More than half believe that evolution is an unverified a theory. Science education in our nation, especially in lower grades, is getting worse, not better. Several states are constantly doing their best to force public schools to teach creationism. Greedy publishers, interested only in profit, turn out book after book on astrology, ufology, the occult, dangerous programs to lose weight without exercising or cutting calories, and every known variety of dubious medicine. The electronic media are equal offenders. Every year I hope the tide is about to turn, and that contributors to television, radio, and the Internet will become so appalled by the flood of fake science they keep flinging at the public that they will at least try to tone it down. Alas, every year the flood gets worse."

"Suppose, however, there is not enough time for measures to be taken to prevent a collision, and earth is shattered by a giant NEO that will hurt us all into oblivion. What are the philosophical implications of such an event? This obviously is not a problem for atheists, agnostics, or pantheists because they are resigned to the fact that nature does not care a rap about preserving a species. What about theists? I’m inclined to think that even to them a certain extinction of humanity would be acceptable. The Biblical Jehovah, remember, is said to have drowned every man, woman, baby, and their pets, except for Noah and his family. If God can allow an earthquake to kill thousands, or the Black Death to wipe out half of Europe, surely she would have no scruples about allowing an asteroid to bring human history to a flaming end."

"Let the Bible be the Bible! It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting."

"The King James Bible is a literary masterpiece best left unaltered. It is a classic to put on a shelf alongside the great fantasies of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and yes, even the Koran."

"For reasons that reflect popular ignorance of science, combined with a love of miracles, the notion that fresh eggs balance more easily on the first day of spring caught fire in the United States."

"Public infatuation with alternative medicines of all varieties shows no sign of abating. Acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, chelation, iridology, therapeutic touch, magnet therapy, psychic healing, and so on are gaining new converts every day. The tragedies occur, of course, when gullible sufferers rely solely on such remedies and avoid seeking mainstream help. It would be good if we had some statistical evidence about the frequency of deaths following reliance on pseudomedicines."

"My attack on Freud brought a raft of angry letters from dedicated Freudians. One reader assured me that Freudianism is “alive and well.” True, but alive and well only among a dwindling remnant of Freud acolytes, not among the majority of today’s psychiatrists or intellectuals."

"This confusion of the certainty of mathematics within a formal system and the uncertainty of its applications to the world is a common mistake often made by ignorant sociologists."

"The deeper question that lies behind the above banalities is whether the rules of baseball are similar to or radically different from the rules of science. Clearly they are radically different. Like the rules of chess and bridge, the rules of baseball are made by humans. But the rules of science are not. They are discovered by observation, reasoning, and experiment. Newton didn’t invent his laws of gravity except in the obvious sense that he thought of them and wrote them down. Biologists didn’t “construct” the DNA helix; they observed it. The orbit of Mars is not a social construction. Einstein did not make up E=mc2 the way game rules are made up. To see rules of science as similar to baseball rules, traffic rules, or fashions in dress is to make a false analogy that leads nowhere."

"But that science moves inexorably closer to finding objective truth can only be denied by peculiar philosophers, naive literary critics, and misguided social scientists. The fantastic success of science in explaining and predicting, above all in making incredible advances in technology, is proof that scientists are steadily learning more and more about how the universe behaves."

"The curious notion that “truth” does not mean “correspondence with reality,” but nothing more than the successful passing of tests for truth, was dealt a death blow by Alfred Tarski’s famous semantic definition of truth: “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. The definition goes back to Aristotle. Most philosophers of the past, all scientists, and all ordinary people accept this definition of what they mean when they say some thing is true. It is denied only by a small minority of pragmatists who still buy John Dewey’s obsolete epistemology."

"Carlos Castaneda died in Westwood, California, in 1998. “His only real sorcery,” writes Kathryn Lindskoog in her entertaining book Fakes, Frauds, and Other Malarkey (1993), “was turning the University of California into an ass.” The next time you come close to a crow, try calling out “Hello Carlos!” If you are high enough on peyote, you might hear the bird answer."

"Although Jacobs has had no training in psychology, psychiatry, or hypnotherapy, he uses hypnotism to induce his patients (now more than seven hundred) to develop strong memories of horrendous abductions even though many patients had no such memories until hypnotized. Jacobs is convinced that five million Americans have been kidnapped at least once by aliens. One female patient, who worked in retail sales, had, according to Jacobs, one hundred abductions in one year, an average of one every three days!"

"To support his conviction that the Old Testament is accurate history, Newton worked out an elaborate chronology of earth’s history, drawing on astronomical data such as eclipses and star motions and legends such as that of Jason and the Argonauts, which he took to be genuine events. With incredible ingenuity he tried to harmonize biblical history with secular histories of the ancient world. It is sad to envision the discoveries in mathematics and physics Newton might have made if his great intellect had not been diverted by such bizarre speculations."

"His "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American is one of the few bridges over C. P. Snow's famous "gulf of mutual incomprehension" that lies between technical and literary cultures."

"He writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"Gardner is the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us."

"He was not a mathematician—he never even took a maths class after high school—yet Martin Gardner, who has died aged 95, was arguably the most influential and inspirational figure in mathematics in the second half of the last century."

"Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing"

"As a Magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards is pretty simple: It's practice, it's training and it's experimenting while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me."

"President Ford used humor a great deal."

"It's mandatory in this day and age to be considered to have a sense of humor and to demonstrate it. You're not paying me for a joke, You're paying me for the right joke."

"A young person today has a nanosecond attention span, so whatever you do in a humor has to be short. Younger people do not wait for anything that takes time to develop. We're going totally to one-liners. Telling a joke is risk taking. Younger people are more insecure and not willing to put themselves on the line, so a quick one-liner is much safer."

"Dick Cheney has to be the kindliest attack dog ever."

"It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line."

"I remember when humor was gentle pokes. I used to call it 'arm around the shoulder' humor. Now they go for the jugular and they take no prisoners. It's mean, mean stuff."

"If somebody accuses you in a story of being a crook, you can demand that they prove it. But if a comic says it and you protest, people say, 'What's the matter, you can't take a joke?'"

"If you can get someone to laugh with you, they will be more willing to identify with you, listen to you. It parts the waters."

"George Bush has turned into the playboy of the Western world. He shows up at Chinese restaurants, at movies, at the Kennedy Center. He seems to be a totally relaxed, enjoy-the-moment kind of individual. He has shown a sense of playfulness that is very appealing. It shows he isn't overwhelmed by the overwhelming responsibilities he is taking on."

"Very few people ever meet celebrities. All we really know is what we read about them and the most memorable lines are jokes. That's how we tend to define what we think of a public figure."

"Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, 'There he goes again.' A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things."

"Anybody with a good sense of humor is one-up on their competition. We respond to somebody who has the ability to make us laugh. It's a bonding influence."

"Humor starts like a wildfire, but then continues on, smoldering, smoldering for years."

"As much as we admire all the characteristics of a Ronald Reagan, as soon as something goes wrong, people will hate those same characteristics."

"The chance to be seen as a warm, witty guy is too good an opportunity for a politician to miss."

"Humor gives presidents the chance to be seen as warm, relaxed persons. Humor reaches out and puts its arm around the listener and says, 'I am one of you, I understand,' and implicitly it promises, 'I will do something about your problems.'"

"Nowadays, you cannot be a very Effective political figure without Having a demonstrable sense of humor. People take to it."

"I'd be surprised if Ronald Reagan doesn't run again. To us it's a second term. To him it's a double feature."

"Humor is the most honest of emotions. Applause for a speech can be insincere, but with humor, if the audience doesn't like it there's no faking it."

"The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it."

"Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?"

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."

"Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral."

"A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in."

"Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery it's a pen that scratches."

"There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs, there'd be no place to put it all."

"The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than 30 percent of the people in the world."

"More than ever before, Americans are suffering from back problems: back taxes, back rent, back auto payments."

"A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success."

"Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."

"Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards."

"If you can laugh together, you can work together."

"You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair."

"Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away."

"I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home."

"What bothers me about television is that it takes our minds off our minds."

"Successful salesman: someone who has found a cure for the common cold shoulder."

"Wall Street is where prophets tell us what will happen and profits tell us what did happen."

"Did you ever figure to be living in a time when your check is good, but the bank bounces?"

"[on being LGBT in show business] People in the business are equally as terrified now -- but I really find it a personal thing. And maybe I’m at the end of that era. I wouldn’t even want to stereotype today’s generation. But the majority of the casting departments are gay, and a lot of the executives are. I think it’s a matter of your abilities and how you carry yourself -- I don’t behave any differently toward you right now than when I am with David [Burtka, his boyfriend] in our apartment, watching "American Idol." OK, "So You Think You Can Dance." [Laughs] I can see why an agent wouldn’t want to sign on a real overtly effeminate male actor -- not because I have an aversion to them but because agents might know it limits their job opportunities."

"Playing gay in the theater is more fulfilling than on film because you can create a whole character and a backstory and you get to chip away at something over a long period of time. When you’re acting on film you sort of have one afternoon in front of a crew to just do it. And you don’t want to then be too overt and like that stereotype. But when I was doing A Paris Letter with Josh [Radnor], I was playing someone overtly flamboyant from the ’60s seducing him, and if I did that on film, I think it would look like I was acting too hard. It’s one of the fun things one wants to do as an actor, to play the flamboyant gay guy. But when you are gay that ends up being offensive to people. Say I was asked to play a flamboyant steward in an Airplane!–type farce. It would be a difficult decision to say yes to that role at this point because a lot of people would accuse me of making a mockery of gay people."

"My job is jester -- not advocate. I’m on a situation comedy responding to [Josh Radnor’s character] Ted Mosby and his wacky adventures -- that’s my job right now. If people want to comment about where I go to dinner, they are welcome to, but it’s not my job to respond to those statements. The Internet stuff threw me for a loop because I didn’t understand where the vitriol was coming from. I thought I had been representing well, and in turn it seemed like I was quickly condemned to step to the plate, and I was fine with that."

"I’m just really grateful and lucky that I get to keep existing in this business and existing by way of working as opposed to just being around the scene. So I love the process of making all of this. Being on set at the Sesame Workshop was one of the great things of last year for me. Getting just to work with Joss Whedon [on Dr.Horrible] for six days renegade-style was just unbelievable. Every week getting these new scripts and seeing what Barney Stinson gets to say and do is like a constant Christmas present. Things are swell."

"The magic of drama is infinitely more powerful than the magic of trickery. It is as available to the conjurer as it is to the actor. The only difference is that actors take it for granted, whereas few conjurers are even aware that it exists."

"Nelson Mandela? What a cunt. Terry Waite? Bastard. I dunno, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again."

"Hello moose-fuckers! You know what I hate about this country? Half of you speak French and the other half let them."

"How do you give a woman an orgasm? Who cares!"

"My mother thinks I'm at Kings cross right now buying drugs off a prostitute. If she knew I was on the BBC, she'd kill me."

"My idea of Comic Relief is switching Victoria Wood off."

"I only hate two things - living things, and objects."

"I'm actually a bisexual necrophiliac - I'll shag anything that doesn't move."

"I used to think I was great in bed until I discovered that all my girlfriends suffered from asthma."

"Sadowitz is a very different act from Gervais and Carr: low status, stubbornly niche, the connoisseur's misanthrope. I dislike boorish comedy that punches down for kicks, and I appreciate it can be hard to spot the difference when an act only seems to be doing so – especially when they're quoted out of context amid a hysterical media storm. But writing about the offensive comedy debate, Sadowitz has long been my go-to exemplar: if you're as skilful as he is, if you take the pains he takes to contextualise the material, you can be as brutally unpleasant as you like without censure."

"I want to tell you why I did this. My mother was the first one to tell me about the Statue of Liberty. She saw at first from the deck of the ship that brought her to America: she was an immigrant. She impressed upon me how precious our liberty is and how easily it can be lost. And then one day it occurred to me that I could show with magic how we take our freedom for granted. Sometimes we don't realize how important something is until it's gone. So I asked our government for permission to let me make the Statue of Liberty disappear... just for a few minutes. I thought that if we faced emptiness where, for as long as we can remember, that great lady is, lifted up our land, why then... we might imagine what the world would be like without liberty and we realize how precious our freedom really is. And then I will make the Statue of Liberty reappear, by remembering the world that made it appear in the first place. The world is freedom. Freedom is the true magic. It's beyond the power of any magician. But wherever one human being guarantees another the same rights he or she enjoys, we find freedom. [The curtain between the live audience and the Statue of Liberty used to hide the secret of its disappearance is raised] How long can we stay free? But just as long as we keep thinking, and speaking, and acting as free human beings. Our ancestors just couldn’t. We can. And I will show you the way. Nooooow! [The curtain is lowered and the Statue of Liberty reappears]"

"We’re taught in the Jewish tradition the same story over and over, whether it’s the Holocaust or the Maccabees, we have to rise above persecution and do our best, just as the magic is about making people dream, we learned to take things that aren’t supposed to be and turn them into something beautiful."

"Both time and reality have always been regarded suspiciously in the Village, and various pharmaceutical concoctions are purveyed to those who wish to circumvent them."

"I’m giving up everything I can’t stand for Lent."

"We were getting very good at pauses. This one, while not quite pregnant, had certainly been fooled around with."

"“What will people say?” “Who,” I asked, “is going to tell them?”"

"Let’s set a precedent and try to approach this thing logically."

"The deadline was two months earlier, but like myself Mike considered deadlines in financial rather than chronological terms."

"Everybody seemed to be in show business; what the hell had happened to the audience?"

"All of this did not take long, because when I argue with myself I always have the uncomfortable knowledge that I’m going to lose; therefore I do it fast to get it over with."

"Jake was being Subtle, which was only laughable; when he was straightforward he was incomprehensible."

"“I opposed this (the invasion of Earth),” it (the alien) continued, “having doubts about the validity or usefulness of this continued aggression. In opposing it I was, of course, opposing the Pattern, and for a Triskan to do this was what you would call blasphemy.” “Don’t feel bad,” I interjected. “Most everyone on this planet is ready to kill and destroy for their local god.” “Yes,” the 3V agreed, “and almost without exception, the other races and civilization we have encountered have been quite ready to do violence of all kinds to their fellow sharers of life, so long as they could claim to be doing the will of a higher power, be it a god or a government.”"

"I’ve been lucky - I’ve dealt with, and studied with, VERY successful people, and it seems to me the more successful the performer, the less they have to hide, and the less they feel it necessary to make you feel bad about yourself or what you do. That’s true in many arenas, though – the more comfortable someone is in his or her own skin, the more they have to offer, and the more comfortable YOU feel while around them – you can actually connect and share as human beings. The pressure of trying to impress one another evaporates, because a mutual respect already exists."

"Once I got into it, I (realized) in this medium, you can use musical theater to connect and make a dream come true, like fly on stage. Through stagecraft you can wow (the audience) and make them feel that sense of wonder. ... You’re singing, you’re dancing, and you’re performing a feat of wonder. I couldn’t stop thinking in those terms. There was so much potential."