"Entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality."
Jurassic Park
"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."
State of Fear
"like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day."
Jurassic Park
"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."
State of Fear
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -MARK TWAIN"
State of Fear
"I've seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. At this point in my life, I can only agree. So many fears have turned out to be untrue or wildly exaggerated that I no longer get so excited about the latest one."
"We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."
Jurassic Park
"Terror can fill any space"
Sphere
"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. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that's got to change."
State of Fear
"Montaigne said three hundred years ago, 'Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known."
State of Fear
"The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die."
"The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate."
State of Fear
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results."
"The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don't."
State of Fear
"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree."
Timeline
"In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all."
State of Fear
"Biography," observed Oscar Wilde, "lends to death a new terror."
Dragon Teeth
"Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all."
The Lost World
"This is precisely the kind of critical turnabout that has always frustrated and infuriated architects. No less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren, writing two hundred years earlier, complained that 'the peoples of London may despise some eyesore until it is demolished, whereupon by magick the replacement is deemed inferior to the former edifice, now eulogized in high and glowing reference.'"
The Great Train Robbery
"It was terribly important that such women should marry. The failure to marry--spinsterhood--implied a kind of dreadful crippling, for it was universally acknowledged that "a woman's true position was that of administratrix, mainspring, guiding star of the home," and if she was unable to perform this function, she became a sort of pitiful social misfit, an oddity."
The Great Train Robbery
"Monster' is a relative term; to a canary, a cat is a monster. We're just used to being the cat."
"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."
State of Fear
“If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal, it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.”
State of Fear
“And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”
State of Fear
“Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.”
State of Fear
"So what you have is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump. Except in this case there is no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after another and, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect."
State of Fear
"Arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, ...And the environmental movement pushed hard for it."
"But DDT was a carcinogen."
"No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban."
"It was unsafe."
"Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years, in one experiment. After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."
"We disagree about all this."
"Only because you lack the relevant facts, or are unwilling to face up to the consequences of the actions of organizations you support. Banning DDT will someday be seen as a scandalous blunder." "DDT was never banned."
"You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid." Kenner shook his head. "But the unarguable point, 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...Once again, there can be no action without harm."
State of Fear
“civilization doesn’t separate us from nature...Civilization protects us from nature.
State of Fear
"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."
"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right."
"We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead."
"There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago? When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"
"Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?"
No comments:
Post a Comment