State of Fear

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants.

When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?

Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

Even if you don’t believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.

Like all trial attorneys, he knew the importance of not dressing too well.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.

You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.

I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don’t.

The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The

based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban,

If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.

They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems—because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.

I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

G.K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), “If you believe in nothing, you’ll believe in anything.” That

Save the Earth” and beneath that, “There’s Nowhere Else to Go.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. —MARK TWAIN

for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And