Quote from Carl Sagan

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Carl Sagan on the question of extraterrestrial life when asked for his gut feeling.

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A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can't be altered to suit the theory.

—Clive James (23/10/2009)
The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.

—Isaac Asimov
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have. I merely give robust expression to views about the cosmos and morality with which you happen to disagree. You interpret that as ‘intolerance’ because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, which expects to get a free ride and not have to defend itself. If I wrote a book called The Socialist Delusion or The Monetarist Delusion, you would never use a word like intolerance. But The God Delusion sounds automatically intolerant. Why? What’s the difference? I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’. There is a huge difference.

—Richard Dawkins
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

—Aldous Huxley
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

—Isaac Asimov
It is misleading to bring (...) background metaphysical uncertainty into the foreground by speaking of probabilities. When we actually assert probabilities – "it will probably rain this week" – we base our claim on real-world observations. We might, for example, cite the observed frequency with which weather conditions like these produce rain. Probability assertions, in other words, are themselves based on evidence. They are not neurotically cautious moves to guard against outcomes which no observation gives us any reason to expect. We don't say: "we probably don't have tentacles". We just say that we don't. We don't feel some need to cover our ass in case we've been hallucinating all these decades. So it should be with God's existence. If we omit the "probably" from "we probably don't have tentacles", we should omit it from "there probably is no God".

—Michael Neumann (2009)
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

—Stephen Jay Gould (1981)
Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, "with both eyes open."

—Nicolaus Copernicus
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

—Jules Henri Poincaré
The [George W.] Bush administration has done more damage to our national identity than any administration before it... You can't have the rule of law when the vice president [Dick Cheney] claims laws don't apply to him. You can't have a nation of reason when the government elevates faith and politics over fact and science. And you can't have equal opportunity for a common good when the rules are rigged to solidify ever larger gains for those at the top. Bush has substituted our Enlightenment values with his own: crass materialism (go shopping to show your love of country), class privilege, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, religious zealotry and American exceptionalism.

—Robyn Blumner, Tribune Media Services
Consensus is not a fact-based exercise.

—Bad Religion
If what I say is wrong (because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence), then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, it is your problem.

—Satoshi Kanazawa
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

—Thomas Huxley
The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

—Thomas Henry Huxley
Sceptics, say the believers, don't care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it.

—Clive James (23/10/2009)
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

—John Adams
To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.

—A. C. Grayling
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

—Stephen Jay Gould
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

—Dan Barker
I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

—Richard Dawkins

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