Charles Fort Quotes

It's not that I think every late 19th-century man with a beard who saw something shimmering in front of him was actually seeing his dead aunty. What I'm saying is: lighten up. This isn't weird stuff. It's interesting.

We're awash in toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others, is the idea that truth doesn't matter, that truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything. Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people, and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways. The truth really does matter.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

Lawyers have a way of seeing that sets them apart from the rest of us. In some way this special vision makes them invaluable, and in other ways, repulsive. Lawyers are much more focused on rational, logical, and objective criteria to the exclusion of the emotional, subjective, and sometimes irrational reponses to the world. Moreover, lawyers like to show no emotion, and possess a particular disdain for the emotions that are found in others, which has the quality of making them seem inhuman.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

I am a Spiritualist, a proud wearer of the Spiritualist badge. Mediums and psychic research have gone on for many, many years.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

It might not be true, but that doesn't mean it's nonsense.

Science when well-digested is nothing but good sense and reason.

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.

One thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. To my innocent mind, 'dead' implies incapable of communicating.

O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

Ruth Montgomery had a book I was reading called Aliens Among Us. She was an automatic writer. She used to go into a trance, and she would just start typing information, and then she would come out of her trance and read it and go, "Wow," and that was just the way she wrote her books.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!

Science is the only true guide in life.

I'm supposed to be a scientific person but I use intuition more than logic in making basic decisions.

Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways.

Expose every belief to the light of reason, discourse, facts, scientific observations; question everything, be sceptical because this is the only chance at life you will ever get.

Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.