Quotes About Evidence

Many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse---and without examining evidence which their "common sense" told them was impossible.

A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong---and you are strong. The great trouble with religion---any religion---is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask in at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason---but one cannot have both

She hesitated slightly. "I've seen what was called telekinesis with dice—but I'm no mathematician and I could not testify that what I saw was telekinesis." "Hell's bells, you wouldn't testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy.

if you are ever suspected of something, try to make the evidence point to a lesser offense. Never try to prove lily-white innocence. Human nature being what it is, your chances are better.

history is loaded with "scientists" jumping to conclusions from superficial evidence.

Boss, there ain't no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy.

We have already explained that, of course — even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Besides, it was only coincidence. (Remember that phrase. It is the self-hypnotic chant by which the New Inquisition banishes all evidence it does not like. We will hear it often.)

Most anecdotal evidence concerns ESP between members of the same family. I find that very significant. It obviously has something to do with physical contact. A hell of a lot of ESP involves mothers and children. They were once part of her body. Thet seems to me to fit right in with Bell's theorem: the idea that things once connected remain always in contact even though they are separated.

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

Remember: I am not asking you to believe these yarns at all. We know how much nonsense gets published these days, do we not? I am merely asking that you observe in yourself the strength and immediacy of the impulse to deny at once. Does this impulse vary according to the weight of the circumstantial evidence (such as it is) or according to how much your own imprinted and conditioned reality-tunnel is challenged?

In the short run, Orr's law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.*

So far the "hard evidence" doesn't seem to prove much . . . But to avoid any suggestion of the weird, you have to hold a really dogmatic faith that (a) the "normal" really exists, and (b) you know all of its contents . . .

My good friend Joel Fort, M.D., a rare bird who is both a psychiatrist and a sociologist, repeatedly tells me, when I recount such tales to him, that there is no scientific proof of cause-and-effect LSD influence in these transformations. "There is no proof," he repeats, "that a drug alone causes such changes. All the evidence suggests, rather, that the ideas that are fashionable in the drug-using world are the causative factor in such conversions.

Some people (Roman Catholics, New Agers, heretical holistic physicians, etc.) will eagerly believe this yarn. Other people (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the American Medical Association, old-fangled Village Atheists etc.) just as eagerly wish not to believe it at all, at all.

Of course, I know that, like the Nazi Big Lie, male "inferiority" will go on getting repeated endlessly, no matter how much scientific evidence contradicts it. Politics does not rest upon scientific validations. Politics rests upon passion and prejudice; otherwise, this planet might become suddenly stark staring sane.

Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives. "This guy," Charlie said, and looked at his notebook, "Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer." Belson glanced at him. "We all thought that," Belson said, "when he was a cop.

Just because it's printed somewhere, that's no reason you have to believe it any more than if you saw it." Harry blinked. "I never thought of that angle before.

The backseat was even worse. Taco wrappers, drive-thru cups, and greasy napkins covered the floor. I dug through most of it, but the only evidence I found was evidence of tooth decay. Tyson was an eating machine. He probably turned to crime to pay for a junk food habit.

In fact, it wasn't evidence at all, but I didn't want to be a defeatist.

Behind him, McIntosh whispered. "What if it's people?" "It's not." "I know these are animal heads, but this could be human blood. These organs could be from people." "They aren't. Butchered people smell different." McIntosh studied Pike as if wondering how Pike knew that, then pointed out the wall behind the counter. "Check

There are two crime scenes at every kidnapping. The first crime scene is where they snatch you, the second is where the cops find your body.

She blushed and we went into a small lab that looked not unlike a doctor's office and smelled of naphtha. A black Formica counter ran along one wall with a shelf of little bottles above it and three light trays. A single steel sink was sunk into the counter, with a binocular microscope on one side of it and a large magnifying glass on a gooseneck stand on the other. Modern crime fighting at its cutting-edge finest.

Still, people sometimes do strange things for strange reasons, and I decided to see what Mrs. Louise Earle had to offer. I expected that she would support her son's claims, but in the doing perhaps she would add something to give them greater credence.

If a future judge excluded the watchband, he or she might also exclude all downstream evidence derived from the band. The downstream evidence was called "fruits of the poisonous tree," under the principle that evidence derived from bad evidence was also bad. If investigators knew they had a piece of bad fruit, they tried to find a path around the bad fruit by using unrelated evidence to reach the same result. This was called a work-around. Mills