Quotes in italics appear in the book, but are attributed to someone other than the author.

"All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike— and yet it is the most precious thing we have." —Albert Einstein (2)

"Mr. "Buckley"— well-spoken, intelligent, curious— had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works." (4)

"If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good." (6)

"The technological perils science serves up, its implicit challenge to received wisdom, and its perceived difficulty, are all reasons for some people to avoid it... The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, but of course especially on scientists, a new responsibility— more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive." (11-12)

"Naturally people try various belief on for size, to see if they help. And if we're desperate enough, we become all too willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden of skepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful and emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled." (14)

"If we teach only the findings and products of science— no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be— without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?" (21)

"Two men came to a hole in the sky. One asked the other to lift him up... But so beautiful was it in heaven that the man who looked over the edge forgot everything, forgot his companion whom he had promised to help up and simply ran off into all the splendor of heaven." —From an Iglulik Inuit prose poem, early 12th century, told by Inugpasujuk to Knud Rasmussen, the Greenlandic arctic explorer. (24)

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time— when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." (25)

"We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements— transportation, communications, and all other industries, agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting— profoundly depend on science and technology. We have arranged things so that no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." (26)

"Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about out diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us— then, habits of of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." (27)

"The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions.... This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change." (27)

"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us— and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along." (38-39)

"An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth— scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in [media]— might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them, science and a sense of hope." (39)

""Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being would be willing to live there."

"Well, then!" said Micromegas, "perhaps the being that inhabit it do not possess good sense.""—One alien to another, on approaching the Earth, in Voltaire's "Micromegas: A Philosophical History" (62)

"One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any preposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon warrant." —John Locke (66)

"... the tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although skepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence the public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism." (77)

"Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing being testified." —Thomas Henry Huxley (80)

As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is to be no more feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror..." —Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things" (98)

"There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness." —The Isa Upanishad (114)

"Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion." —Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan" (114)

"A credulous mind... finds most delight in believing strange things , and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such." —Samuel Butler, "Characters" (136)

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist the facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." —Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (152)

"True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality." —Gabriel García Márquez, "Strange Pilgrims" (152)

"Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public." —E. M. Butler, "The Myth of the Magus" (170)

"Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so." (171)

"... I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence until the evidence is in." (180)

"Keeping an open mind is a virtue— but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. Of course we must be willing to change our minds when warranted by new evidence. But the evidence must be strong. Not all claims to knowledge have equal merit." (187)

"... how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief." —Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Tenth Elegy" (190)

"The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and the affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would". For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore, he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of the deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and often imperceptible, in which the affections color and affect the understanding." —Francis Bacon, "Novum Organon" (202)

"Infidelity does not consist in believing, or not believing; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe....When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional beliefs to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." —Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason" (207)

"The foundation of morality is to... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge." —Thomas Henry Huxley (207)

"A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts." —William K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief" (220)

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles persist as the new ones rise." (241)

"Skeptical scrutiny is not only the toolkit for rooting out bunkum and cruelty that prey on those least able to protect themselves and most in need of compassion, people offer little other hope. It is also a timely reminder that mass rallies, radio, television, the print media, electronic marketing, and mail-order technology permit other kinds of lies to be injected into the body politic— to take advantage of the frustrated, the unwary, and the defenseless in a society riddled with political ills that are being treated ineffectively if at all." (244)

"The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire it draws. Just when we've finally understood something that the scientists are talking about, they tell us it's no longer true. And even if it is, there's a slew of new things— things we never heard of, things difficult to believe, things with disquieting implications— that they claim to have discovered recently. Scientists can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn everything, as socially dangerous." (247)

"For centuries, science has been under a line of attack that, rather than pseudoscience, can be called antiscience. Science, and academic scholarship in general, the connection these days goes, is too subjective. Some even allege it's entirely subjective, as is, they say, history." (252)

"Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-sponsored ideology or popular prejudice would hog-tie scientific progress is unthinkable. For 200 years Americans have prided themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudoscience has flourished in the United States— on race, for example. Under the guise of "creationism", a serious effort continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory— the most powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology— from being taught in the schools." (263)

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." —Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (266)

"... a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generation ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a "spirit world" than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones." (268)

"It is the particular task of scientists, I believe, to alert the public to possible dangers, especially those emanating from science or those forseeable through the use of science. Such a mission is, as you might say, prophetic. Clearly the warnings need to be judicious and not more flamboyant than the dangers require; but if we must make errors, given the stakes, they should be on the side of safety.... The price of moral ambiguity is now to high. For this reason— and not because of its approach to knowledge— the ethical responsibility of scientists must also be high, extraordinarily high, unprecedentedly high." (291)

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true." —Remark attributed to Michael Faraday (295)

"Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth." —Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic" (295)

"If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically— not to accept uncritically whatever we're told; to surmount as best we can out hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." (296)

"A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future." (317)

"... when what needs to be learned changes quickly, especially in the course of a single generation, it becomes much harder to know what to teach and how to teach it. Then, students complain about relevance; respect for their elders diminishes. Teachers despair at how educational standards have deteriorated, and how lackadaisical students have become. In a world in transition, students and teachers need to teach themselves one essential skill— learning how to learn." (321)

"There are many better responses than making the child feel that asking deep questions constitutes a social blunder. If we have an idea of the answer, we can try to explain. Even an incomplete attempt constitutes a reassurance and encouragement. If we have no idea, of the answer, we can go to the encyclopedia. If we don't have an encyclopedia, we can take the child to the library. Or we might say: "I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first person to find out.

There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

Bright, curious children are a national and world resource. They need to be cared for, cherished, and encouraged. But mere encouragement isn't enough. We must also give the the essential tools to think with." (323)

"There's a widely held perception that science is "too hard" for ordinary people. We see this reflected in the statistic that only around 10 percent of American high school students ever opt for a course in physics. What makes science suddenly "too hard"? Why isn't it too hard for the citizens of all those other countries that are outperforming the United States?... Most American children aren't stupid. Part of the reason they don't study hard is because they receive few tangible benefits when they do. Competency (that is, actually knowing the stuff) in verbal skills, mathematics, science, and history these days doesn't increase earnings for average young men in their first eight years out of high school— many of whom take service rather than industrial jobs." (328)

"I want us to rescue Mr. "Buckley" and the millions like him I also want us to stop turning out leaden, incurious, uncritical, and unimaginative high school seniors. Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Science, I maintain, is an absolutely essential tool for any society with a hope of surviving well into the next century with its fundamental values intact— not just science as engaged in by its practitioners, but science understood and embraced by the entire human community. And if the scientists will not bring this about, who will?" (336)

"The Lord [Buddha] replied to the Venerable Sariputra:

"In some village, city, market town, country district, province, kingdom, or capital there lived a householder, old, advanced in years, decrepit, weak in health and strength, but rich, wealthy, and well-to-do. His house was a large one, both extensive and high, and it was old, having been built a long time ago. It was inhabited by many living beings, some two, three, four, or five hundred. It had one single door only. It was thatched with straw, its terraces had fallen down, its foundations were rotten, its walls, matting-screens, and plaster were in an advanced state of decay. Suddenly a great blaze of fire broke out, and the house started burning on all sides. And that man had many young sons, five, or ten, or twenty, and he himself got out of the house.

When that man saw his own house ablaze all around with the great mass of fire, he became afraid and trembled, his mind became agitated, and he thought to himself: "I, it is true, have been competent enough to run out of the door, and to escape from my burning house, quickly and safely, without being touched or scorched by that great mass of fire. But what about my sons, my young boys, my little sons? There, in this burning house, they play, sport, and amuse themselves with all sorts of games. They do not know that this dwelling is afire, they do not understand it, do not perceive it, pay no attention to it, and so they feel no agitation. Though threatened by this great [fire], though in such close contact with so much ill, they pay no attention to their danger, and make no efforts to get out."" —from The Saddharmapundarika, in Buddhist Scriptures (338)

"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosopher who say that only the educated are free." —Epictetus, "Discourses" (354)

"There was a most revealing rule: Slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished '[To] make a contented slave,' [Fredrick Douglass] wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society." (355)

"Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others;, not just those in power; to contemplate— with the best teachers— the insights, painfully extracted from nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society." (357)

Pages 362-363:

"In its early years, the United States boasted one of the highest— perhaps the highest literacy rates in the world. (Of course, slaves and women didn't count in those days.)… Today, the United States is not the world leader in literacy. Many of those judged literate are unable to read and understand very simple material— much less a sixth-grade textbook, an instruction manual, a bus schedule, a mortgage statement, or a ballot initiative. And the sixth-grade textbooks of today are much less challenging than those of a few decades ago, while literacy requirements at the workplace have become more demanding than ever before.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

Even if we hardened out hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe— the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and potentially bright minds who would help solve dilemmas besetting us.

Fredrick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path." (362-363)

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." —George Washington (380)

"Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom." —Latin proverb (402)

"Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, … perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it's drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or "desecrating" (literally, making unholy) the flag.

Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights." (406)

"It is possible— given absolute control over the media and police— to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It corks to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition.

In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining her is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes." (414)

"The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Then where would we be?" (416)

"The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community— as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy." (419)

"... science— or rather its delicate mix of openness and skepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate— is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society." (431)

"Now it's no good to have such rights if they're not used— a right of free speech when no one contradicts the government, freedom of the press when no one is willing to ask the tough questions, a right of assembly when there are no protests, universal suffrage when less than half the electorate votes, separation of church and state when the wall of separation is not regularly repaired. Through disuse they can become no more than votive objects, patriotic lip-service. Rights and freedoms: Use 'em or lose 'em." (433)

"Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen— or the citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness." (434)