What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.