Floyd Skloot Quotes

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal.

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

You have to look life straight in the eye. De-mystify your world. Can you really afford to believe magic is for real? Not when time is concerned.

Nature is neither reasonable nor just. Nature is exact.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.

The old beliefs, of course, and the rational approach, are everywhere reinforced, and so it does have a great weight. The magical approach has far greater weight, if you use it and allow yourselves to operate in that fashion, for it has the weight of your basic natural orientation.

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

How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn't make any sense at all in the sunlight?

[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.

Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.

The Bible of nature is the best damn Bible in the world. Its laws are perfect and grand, and all the prayers in the world can't change them. There is intelligence and law in this world, and there may be supreme intelligence and law, but so far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is all a damned fake.

Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

Anger is stupid, and stupidity will kill you more surely than your opponent's blade.

Physical science enjoys the distinction of being the most fundamental of the experimental sciences, and its laws are obeyed universally, so far as is known, not merely by inanimate things, but also by living organisms, in their minutest parts, as single individuals, and also as whole communities. It results from this that, however complicated a series of phenomena may be and however many other sciences may enter into its complete presentation, the purely physical aspect, or the application of the known laws of matter and energy, can always be legitimately separated from the other aspects.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.