Rainer Weiss Quotes

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

We're living in interesting times, where people seem to be able to say things which are contrary to what you would call rationalism.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

We have a tendency to think everyone's idiotic and everyone's only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There's great truth in that, I suppose, but then it's also not true.

Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.

Our society has lost confidence in the power of reason, except perhaps scientific reason.

A democracy becomes ungovernable if a substantial portion of the population lives in an alternative reality…. How do you have a rational conversation about President Obama’s policies of he believes that Obama is a spy for Iran.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.

We have to challenge lies. We have to challenge falsehoods and conspiracy theories. If you don't, they fester - unchecked and unchallenged.

Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.

One of the things I wanted to do in 'The Death of Truth' was explore some of the larger social and political dynamics that fueled the rise of Trump and brought America to the point where a third of the country will casually shrug off hard facts about everything from the size of inaugural crowds to the crime rate among immigrants.

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

In the era of President Trump, we've gone from believing things that are 'true enough' to believing things that aren't true at all, and can be demonstrably proven so.

We live in a world where we don't really hear ideas. We just hear propaganda. That's not just boring. It's also very dangerous.

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

We have Internet now and people are not stupid. But it seems that some people are trying to push the same agenda of the Cold War of conspiracy theories and amazing achievements that are very easily traced and validated.

America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.