Quotes About Debunking

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)

I fight for the debunking of the artist and an end to individual pictures.

The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.

I spend my life mostly disproving conspiracies.

A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process

Vaccines in general and MMR in particular do not cause autism, period, end of story.

Brandolini's law, developed in the context of twenty-first social media, is equally applicable to 1920s Klan-speak: 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

The skeptical rule is, No one gets the final say: you may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn't-be-more-wrong.

It is an interesting feature of the Chan tradition (and of all similar iconoclastic trends) that its radical language, aimed at debunking an orthodoxy, soon becomes the sign or emblem of a new orthodoxy.

There is a lot of pseudo-science and nonsense out there on the Internet, and everyone feels the need to send it to me. And I'm sitting there thinking, 'It isn't real! Stop it!'

the very greatest satire, I came to think -- the kind that lives forever -- ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself *that* seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own.

There is not a single extant study that supports all the arguments against men being with their children. It's absolute bollocks

Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Everything popular is wrong. —OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest

Because the more you engage with someone who is spreading untruths, the more validity you give to those untruths.

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.

Debunking the Bunk

Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.

Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle.