In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have p...
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge.
No. No more surprises. No more secrets. Or so help me, I will rip off your own leg and beat you with it.
God, now she knew what decent men felt like, the disquiet before taking someone for their first time.
A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.
Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds o...
People reveal as much by their silence as they do by what they say.
She laughed and said how silly we were to not accept life for what it was, difficult.
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with extraterrestrials. I am invited to “ask them anything.” And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So...
Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
It always looked to me like she was smiling. In fact, I know she was. Lots if things smile, like a flower to the sun. And one thing sure. I knew that just like I could smile to see Pinky, she sure could smile to see me.
Ash held one finger up. "OK. Now listen-" Mary-Lynnette kicked him in the shins. She knew it was inapporopriate, she knew it was uncalled-for, but she couldn't stop herself. She just to. "Oh, for God's sake," Ash said, hopping backward. "Are you ?
Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.
Son sus silencios lo que debéis temer, no sus palabras.
Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.
See, they say it’s ‘survival of the fittest’, but you and I really know that it’s ‘survival of the most heavily armed
The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time.
Killing time is not an easy job
The world is full of ways and means to waste time
Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.
