Quotations From the Book

he following quotations were all taken directly from You Must Not Let Them Con You! There's Too Much at Stake. The purpose of presenting them to you is to give you a taste of the book's flavor.

	“There is no more pernicious influence on public policy than permitting rhetoric to obscure reality.”
	“. . . since no one can sense the past or future, they’re not real. Which means that any statements made about the past or the future cannot be real – that is, they cannot be true nor can they be false. They can only be believable or not believable.”
	“Everyone’s mind tends to hear only what it wants to hear and to see only what it wants to see, with the inevitable consequence that everyone’s mind believes only what it wants to believe. So no one is objective – not judges, journalists, arbitrators, educators, clergymen, physicians, college and university professors, medical researchers, scientists, mathematicians. Not anyone. It’s just not possible.”
	“Don’t strive to impress others with the size of your vocabulary or with the ease with which you can put words together . . . anyone who is impressed by big words or obscure passages is not worth impressing to begin with.”
	“Contrary to popular notion, virtually all science is based on inference, rather than on knowledge . . . [Scientists] frequently say that they know something to be true, when they don’t and can’t. In such cases, they’re either guilty of a careless use of language, or of wanting to con the public.”
	“When a school bases its enrollment policy on racial percentages, it’s racism. When government does it, then it’s affirmative action.”
	“No single member of any racial, religious, ethnic, or vocational group speaks for all the members of that group on any issue, the propensity of the news media to king-make notwithstanding.”
	“Critics deal exclusively in their own opinions, nothing more, and they throw those opinions out into the wind, so to speak, to be picked up by anyone who is interested.”
	“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”
	“Expertise is an intangible characteristic, not a tangible one. Therefore, no one can be an expert without someone else thinking that she is, any more than someone can be greedy, beautiful, moral, ethical, or courageous without someone else thinking that she is.”
	“The ‘science’ of statistics, when people are the object of study, is unreliable. The equations used may be mathematically impressive, the number crunching equally striking. But statistics about human behavior are undependable, because statistics are part of one world while humans are part of another. And the two worlds never meet.”
	“Psychology a science? Don’t make me laugh.”
	“Because there are about 200 different kinds of [psychological] therapy currently in use, the odds against picking a winner are better at a racetrack than they are in a psychologist’s office.”
	“All [historical] research material is suspect. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable. And non-eyewitness accounts are based upon unreliable eyewitness accounts (or are even sheer fabrications)."
	“Histories have enormous significance and influence despite the overwhelmingly compelling inference that they’re always wrong.”