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By AnonymJames Randi
A lot of people hate my skepticism, and I think I understand why. The psychics offer wonders and endless possibilities in a world that often seems difficult and mundane. They promise health, wealth, wisdom, eternal life. But if you examine the record, it's not the psychics but the hard-nosed scientists who have actually delivered the things that improve human life. And, to me, science describes a world far more interesting than any psychic fantasy. It's a good world -- not perfect -- but it's ours. So we'd better learn to live with it, the way it is.
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By AnonymJames Randi
A quick example of that is a woman who said she'd been healed of throat cancer where the faith healer admitted he touched her on the forehead.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Blind belief can be comforting, but it can easily cripple reason and productivity, and stop intellectual progress.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Escapology has one thing going for it that probably made Harry Houdini such a superstar in his day and a legend in the present. Everyone wants to escape from something. Taxes, contracts, illness, work, the multitude of burdens that we chafe under are shadows from which we want to escape.
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By AnonymJames Randi
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.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Feeling better is not actually being better.
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By AnonymJames Randi
gods are children's blankets that get carried over into adulthood.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Heroin also makes people feel better, but I wouldn't recommend using heroin.
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By AnonymJames Randi
However, I believe that it would be difficult to have legitimate scientists agree to participate.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I believe in the basic goodness of my species, because that appears to be a positive tactic and quality that leads to better chances of survival- and in spite of our foolishness, we seem to have survived.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I can go into a lab and fool the rear ends off any group of scientists.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I do not expect that homeopathy will ever be established as a legitimate form of treatment, but I do expect that it will continue to be popular.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I don't expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I questioned her further, and eventually got to talk to her doctor. And her doctor sort of shook his head and he said, I have examined her for throat cancer at least 15 times in the past few years.
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By AnonymJames Randi
I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller's eyes.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they're gonna fool you, and then they do it.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Nature doesn't cheat - people do.
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By AnonymJames Randi
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
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By AnonymJames Randi
No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer.
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By AnonymJames Randi
No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.
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By AnonymJames Randi
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.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $1,000,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe.
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By AnonymJames Randi
People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.
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By AnonymJames Randi
[Psychics] use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do - the same physical methods, the same psychological methods - and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth, to their detriment.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence - and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's in the book. It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.
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By AnonymJames Randi
The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.
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By AnonymJames Randi
The market for nonsense is infinite.
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By AnonymJames Randi
The New Age? Its just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds.
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By AnonymJames Randi
The only difference is that religion is much better organized and has been around much longer, but it's the same story with different characters and different costumes.
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By AnonymJames Randi
The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment.
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By AnonymJames Randi
There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized.
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By AnonymJames Randi
There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.
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By AnonymJames Randi
There's something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear - about the escape act in general.
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By AnonymJames Randi
There was a small boy on crutches. I do not know his name, and I suspect I never will. But I will never forget his face, his smile, his sorrow. He is one of the millions robbed of hope and dignity by charlatans discussed in this book. Wherever and whoever he is, I apologize to him for not having been able to protect him from such an experience. I humbly dedicate this book to him and to the many others who have suffered because the rest of us began caring too late.
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By AnonymJames Randi
They would have been very let down if they had to leave the theater and he had missed. He would feel badly. Everyone would feel badly. But he never let them down.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.
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By AnonymJames Randi
To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision.
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By AnonymJames Randi
To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.
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By AnonymJames Randi
We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.
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By AnonymJames Randi
We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.
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By AnonymJames Randi
... We in the USA have been depending on prayers, pleading, and self-abasement to a deity to bring us magical advantages, and have been encouraged to attribute our prosperity and general success among nations, to that sort of action. In my opinion, hard work and dedication to logic and reason ought to be recognized as the reasons for our achievements, not appeals to a mythical friend-in-the-sky. We got where we are in spite of, not because of, those incantations.
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By AnonymJames Randi
There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.
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By AnonymJames Randi
Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments.
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