Skeptics

"One can be a true believer in anything: psychic ability, Christianity or, as Bertrand Russell classically suggested (with irony), in the fact there is a teapot orbiting the earth. I could believe any of those things with total conviction. But my conviction doesn't make them true. Indeed, it is something of an insult to the very truth I might hold dear to say that something is true just because I believe it is."

"The appreciation of a painting or a piece of music, for example, or even falling in love, is all about our subjectivity. But to decide that the entire universe operates in such a way, let alone to go to war because we are so convinced we are right that others must agree with us or die, that surely should demand a higher level of argument than 'It's true because I really, really feel it is."

"We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'."

"Uninformed strong opinions - and I particularly include religious ones, which for some reason get special treatment - are of course mere clusters of prejudices and no more appropriate than mine, yours or anyone else's are on topics we don't understand - as worthless as my opinions on hockey, Noel Edmonds or rimming."

"Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl."

"One minute she is a sweet old silly, knitting herself a set of syringe covers and talking about her favourite flowers, and the very next moment she has told you and your friends she has a ring supporting the back of her vagina."

"Moderate religious people may of course express distaste for such violence, pretending that the clear calls for grotesque and violent behaviour in their sacred book aren't there and cherry-picking the 'nice bits', but they are still guilty of not opening up the subject of belief to rational discourse, and in doing so are part of the machinery that leads to all the ugliness caused by fundamentalism."

"Not believing in something is not in itself a belief or a philosophy: it is the 'ism' at the end that tends to cause the trouble. Both atheists and believers can be as arrogant and witless as each other in frustrated debate, and people may choose strong and unapologetic words to raise awareness of the agenda. But despite the name-calling, it is still a fair point that to not believe in God is no more a 'belief in itself' than to not believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Poseidon or anything else one might personally consider far-fetched. Beyond that, there is only how you choose to express yourself."

"I deeply, and widely, believe that performance is a very personal affair, and that one must pursue one’s own sense of integrity and remain a little detached from advice and precedent offered by tradition."

"I decided that my magic had to change. That I had to give serious thought to presentation. That, in fact, my presentation of the effects is where my impact as a magician lies – I realised that it can turn a good effect into something artistic and stunning."

"Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing."

"Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence."

"Magicians do not, as a rule, presume that their audiences are intelligent and sensitive enough to want the magic to be challenging and cathartic. This is not a healthy starting point, for it stultifies magic and leaves it too close to children’s entertainment."

"In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician."

"How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat."

"I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody's brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process."

"Therapists probably can't ethically do it, and they may have anti-deception provisions in their standards of conduct. But bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U.S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away."

"It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion."

"The results were clear: the new environment inhibited recognition."

"To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything."

"The problem is clear: the unreliability of eyewitness identification evidence poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice and civil litigation."

"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened."

"Even if it's going to be a harmful memory, they don't want to let it go. (This is) why sometimes I get such resistance to the work I do. Because it's telling people that your mind might be full of much more fiction than you realize. And people don't like that."

"Which would you rather have? A kid with obesity, heart problems, shortened lifespan, diabetes -- or maybe a little bit of false memory?"

"Memory works like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people."

"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."

"Mars enjoys global warming yet has almost no atmosphere. To my knowledge, there is no industry or human emissions of CO2 on Mars. There is strong evidence that the Sun drives climate on Mars. The Sun is probably also the main driving force for climate on Earth."

"If we do not understand the cause or causes for the biggest climate change of all time, what hope have we of understanding modern climate change?"

"The climate stubbornly refuses to co-operate with computer models and the writers of alarmist popular articles and books."

"If CO2 derived from modern industrialisation is the culprit for global warming, then why did the global temperature increase from 1918 to 1940, decrease from 1940 to 1976, increase from 1976 to 1998 and decrease from 1998 to the present?"

"Mars, Triton, Pluto and Jupiter all show global warming. Climate changes on other planets and their moons show that climate change elsewhere in the Solar System could not possibly be due to human activity on Earth. There must be a driving force outside the Earth. It is the Sun."

"The hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 can create global warming can be tested by measurement. … No warming has occured since 1998. … During that time atmospheric CO2 has increased. … The test of the hypothesis above shows that there is no relationship between measured temperature and CO2 emissions. The hypothesis fails."

"Studies of the Earth's atmosphere tells us nothing about future climate. An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, paleontology, paleoecology, glaciology, climatology, meterology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history."

"There were no CO2 emitting industries in the Medieval Warming. This natural warming event was greater than the Late 20th Century Warming, which we are told is due to human emissions of CO2."

"It is naïve to think that a [computer] model can predict future events on the Earth. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly."

"To argue that human emissions of CO2 are forcing global warming requires all the known, and possibly chaotic, mechanisms of natural global warming to be critically analysed and dismissed. This has not even been attempted."

"The slogan "Stop climate change" is a very public advertisement of absolute total ignorance as it is not cognisant of history, archaeology, geology, astronomy, ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences and the life sciences."

"Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession."

"They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that."

"What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong”. No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that."

"Just like people, stars can be important without being terribly bright."

"It’s amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we’ll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away."Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective."

"However, science isn't just about showing when you're right; it's also about showing when you're wrong."

"If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.""

"I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact."

"Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted."

"Your petitioners are Atheists and they define their lifestyle as follows. An Atheists loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist thinks that heaven is something for which we should work for now - here on earth- for all men together to enjoy."

"An Atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated."

"Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds."

"Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it. But we're a grown-up world now, and it's time to put away childish things. But people don't, because most of them don't even know what atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God. Madalyn Murray's going to solve her own problems, and nobody's going to intervene. It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: "Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it.""