TLW's Climate Quotes

By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper™

© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved.

Original Pub. Date: Apr. 12, 2020. Last Update: Feb. 4, 2024.




Alternate url for this page:
http://tinyurl.com/climatequotes


"Lead me to those who seek the truth, and deliver me from those who've found it." - Anon.

"Nothing is created by coincidence (at random), rather there is reason and necessity for everything." - Leucippus (d. -420)

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." - Euripides (-480 to -406)

" Against human stupidity even the gods are powerless." - Aristophanes (-446 to -386)

"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses." - Plato (-429 to -347)

"Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106 to -43)

"Natural science does not consist in ratifying what others have said, but in seeking the causes of phenomena" - Albertus Magnus (1193-1280)

"Nature is a source of truth. Experience does not ever err. It is only your judgment that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments. - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"If you do not rest on the good foundation of Nature, you will labor with little honor and less profit." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"Nature never breaks her own laws." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"There is no result in Nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"Although Nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence as I said before with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"Experiment is the interpreter of Nature. Experiments never deceive. I t is our judgment which sometimes deceives itself because it expects results which experiment refuses. We must consult experiment, varying the circumstances, until we have deduced general rules, for experiment alone can furnish reliable rules." - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." - Michael de Montaigne (1533-92)

"For when propositions are denied, there is an end of them, but if they bee allowed, it requireth a new worke." - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"Idols of the Theatre are those which are due to sophistry and false learning. These idols are built up in the field of theology, philosophy, and science, and because they are defended by learned groups are accepted without question by the masses. When false philosophies have been cultivated and have attained a wide sphere of dominion in the world of the intellect they are no longer questioned. False superstructures are raised on false foundations, and in the end systems barren of merit parade their grandeur on the stage of the world." - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"There is a toy, which I have heard, and I would not have it given over, but waited upon a little. They say it is observed in the Low Countries (I know not in what part), that every five and thirty years the same kind and suit of years and weathers comes about again; as great frosts, great wet, great droughts, warm winters, summers with little heat, and the like, and they call it the prime it is a thing I do the rather mention, because, computing backwards, I have found some concurrence." - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war." - William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, 1599, Act. 3, Scene 1, Line 273

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." - Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

"E pur si muove (And yet it moves)." - Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

"He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot, is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave." - William Drummond (1585-1649)

"He that complies against his will/ Is of his own opinion still/ Which he may adhere to, yet disown,/ For reasons to himself best known." - Samuel Butler (1612-80)

"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - Jacques Abbadie (1654-1727)

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect." - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquires." - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

"There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense." - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;/ Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778)

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where men in authority are wrong." - Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778)

"A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone." - Denis Diderot (1713-84)

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder." - U.S. Pres. George Washington (1732-99)

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."- U.S. Pres. John Adams (1735-1826)

"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts." - Patrick Henry (1736-99)

"Most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

"Convince a man against his will, He's of the same opinion still." - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97)

"Two systems are before the world... One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other... the American system, for... elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world." - Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879)

"Alice laughed: 'There's no use trying,' she said; 'one can't believe impossible things.' 'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'" - Charles Dickens (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1812-70), Alice in Wonderland, 1865

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." - Charles Mackay (1814-89), Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

"Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation." - Charles Mackay (1814-89)

"So oft in theologic wars,/ The disputants, I ween,/ Rail on in utter ignorance/ Of what each other mean,/ And prate about an elephant/ Not one of them has seen!" - John Godfrey Saxe (1816-87)

"The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact." – John Tyndall (1820-93)

"From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,/ The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;/ They do not see, within the opened sky,/ The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high./ In every clime and under every sun,/ Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;/ And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye/ And mingles with your madness, irony!" - Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), The Dance of Death in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)

"Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him." - Fyodor Mikhailovich Doystoevsky (1821-81), "The Grand Inquisitor" in "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880)

"The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits." - Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95)

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin... The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification." - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)

"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence." - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a lovely hypothesis by an ugly fact." - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him." - Count Leo (Lev Nikolayevich) Tolstoy (1828-1910) in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You"

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." - Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900)

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of facts." - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)

"How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and hard it is to undo that work again." - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)

"There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it." - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)

"No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time." - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." - Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority." - Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915)

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Planck's Principle: "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Science progresses one funeral at a time.)" - Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858-1947)

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence; it biases the judgment. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. And, the temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession." - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930), The Sign of the Four, 1890

"Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious." - Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

"Give me one just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world." - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (1870-1924)

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. " - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"The love of power is a part of human nature, but power-philosophies are, in a certain precise sense, insane. The existence of the external world, both that of matter and of other human beings, is a datum, which may be humiliating to a certain kind of pride, but can only be denied by a madman. Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. Certified lunatics are shut up because of the proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"It is not altogether true that persuasion is one thing and force is another. Many forms of persuasion – even many of which everybody approves – are really a kind of force. Consider what we do to our children. We do not say to them: 'Some people think the earth is round, and others think it is flat; when you grow up, you can, if you like, examine the evidence and form your own conclusion.' Instead of this we say: 'The earth is round.' By the time our children are old enough to examine the evidence, our propaganda has closed their minds." - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)

"Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./ From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice." - Robert Frost (1874-1963), Fire and Ice, 1923

"[Politics is] the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen." - Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965)

"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack." - Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. (1878-1968)

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. The important thing is to never stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of the truth." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable." - Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken (1880-1956)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." - Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken (1880-1956)

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it." - Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken (1880-1956)

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken (1880-1956)

"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority." - Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915)

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." - Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944)

"A well-known lawyer, now a judge, once grouped witnesses into three classes: simple liars, damned liars, and experts. He did not mean that the expert uttered things which he knew to be untrue, but that by the emphasis which he laid on certain statements, and by what has been defined as a highly cultivated faculty of evasion, the effect was actually worse than if he had." - Nature mag., Nov. 26, 1885

"When I'm wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?" - John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)

"A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time." - David Herbert (D.H.) Lawrence (1885-1930)

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." - U.S. Gen. George S. Patton (1885-1945)

"The human mind is capable of infinite self-deception." - Charles Lee Smith (1887-1964)

"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

/

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/technological elite." - U.S. Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Richard Buckminster Fuller (1893-1985)

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Brave New World

"“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Paul Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)

"That propaganda is good which leads to success. It is not propaganda's task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success." - Paul Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)

"No President, Academy, Court of Law, Congress or Senate on this Earth has the knowledge or power to decide what will be the knowledge of tomorrow." - Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." - Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis (1898-1963)"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis (1898-1963)

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause." - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The True Believer, 1951

"Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts." - Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)

"There is perhaps in all misfits a powerful secret craving to turn the whole of humanity into misfits. Hence partly their passionate advocacy of a drastically new social order. For we are all misfits when we have to adjust ourselves to the wholly new." - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms, 1954

"The charlatan is not usually a cynical individual who preys on the credulous. It is the credulous themselves who manifest a propensity for charlatanism. When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths. Self-deception, credulity and charlatanism are somehow linked together." - - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms, 1954

"The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated." - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The Ordeal of Change, 1959

"Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation." - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The Temper of Our Time, 1967

"The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power... Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that." - Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), Before the Sabbath, 1979

"A theory that explains everything explains nothing." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell. It leads to intolerance. It leads to religious wars, and to the saving of souls through the inquisition. And it is, I believe, based on a complete misunderstanding of our moral duties. It is our duty to help those who need help; but it cannot be our duty to make others happy, since this does not depend on us, and since it would only too often mean intruding on the privacy of those towards whom we have such amiable intentions." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"“If you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can; and if you can design some experimental test which you think might refute my assertion, I shall gladly and to the best of my powers, help you to refute it." - Karl Popper (1902-94)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." – Karl Popper (1902-94)

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50)

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50)

""The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. It helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War is now a purely internal affair." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50)

"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50), Nineteen Eighty Four, 1949

"Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50), Nineteen Eighty Four, 1949

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." - George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50), Nineteen Eighty Four, 1949

"We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert." - Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67)

"Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue." - Robert King Merton (1910-2003)

"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." - John William Gardner (1912-2002)

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Joseph Boorstin (1914-2004)

"You can't have healthy people on a sick planet." - Fr. Thomas Berry (1914-2009)

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." - Saul Bellow (Solomon Bellows) (1915-2005)

"Deeply troubling... are suggestions that there are questions that should not be asked, that there are fields of research that should be eschewed because mankind cannot live with the answers. Nonsense! No such decision can be rational, much less acceptable. Someone will learn, somewhere, sometime. It is both the glory and the curse of the human brain that we must forever live with the truth, once it has been gained. Surely, it is far more dangerous to live with ignorance." - Philip Handler (1917-81)

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That is all there is to it." - Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, 'Is it reasonable?'" - Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live, not knowing, than to have answers which might be wrong." - Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments - but be patient and listen to all the evidence - to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at." - Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some are unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain." - Richard Feynman (1918-88)

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some models are useful." - George Edward Pelham Box (1919-2013)

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'." - Isaac Asimov (1920-92)

"I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets." - John Glenn (1921-2016)

"That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?" - Freeman Dyson (1923-)

"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." - Jean Francois Revel (1924-2006)

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003)

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." - Avram Noam Chomsky (1928-)

"In all science there is a strong 'herd instinct', and interactions occur largely within these herds. They may argue vigorously about details, but they maintain solidarity, or close ranks, when challenged by other herds or individuals. The herd instinct is strengthened greatly if those making funding decisions are members of that herd. Strays do not get funded, and their work, no matter how innovative, is neglected as the herd rumbles on. Herd members will change their views rapidly, however, if the herd leaders change direction. By contrast, if the innovators are not part of the herd it becomes very difficult, or impossible, for them to change the herd's direction." - Gordon J.F. MacDonald (1929-2002)

"Genuine science is the opposite of dogmatism, but that does not keep dogmatists from invoking the name of science in order to shut off debate. Science is a method of analysis, rather than simply a set of conclusions. In fact, much of the history of science is a history of having to abandon the prevailing conclusions among scientists in light of new evidence or new methods of analysis." - Thomas Sowell (1930-)

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God." - Thomas Sowell (1930-)

"With the 'global warming' zealots predicting catastrophic consequences over the next century, I wonder if anyone has studied how accurate five-day weather forecasts turn out to be." - Thomas Sowell (1930-)

"'Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible." - Thomas Sowell (1930-)

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." - Carl Sagan (1934-96), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all belief, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects." - Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (1925-2013)

"The doomsters' favourite subject today is climate change. Clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism." - Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (1925-2013)

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." - Thomas Sowell (1930-)

"The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you're dead." - Paul Ralph Ehrlich (1932-)

"As we know/ There are known knowns/ There are the things we know we know. We also know/ There are known unknowns/ That is to say/ We know there are some things/ We do not know/ But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know/ We don't know." - Donald Henry Rumsfeld (1932-)

"The Earth is not dying it is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses." - Utah Phillips (1935-2008)

"I'm convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature. It is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion, a religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current very small increase in temperatures, and they should be punished" - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

"Sometimes the very learned and clever can be brilliantly foolish, especially when seized by an apparently good cause." - Cardinal George Pell (1941-)

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." - John Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

"The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance." - John Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had." - John Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

"Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they willfully pass it on, they are to blame." - Daniel Clement Dennett III (1942-)

"CO2 greenhouse warming theory is moose hockey because the Earth's atmosphere isn't a greenhouse but a gigantic chimney." - T.L. Winslow (1953-)

"CO2 can't cause global heating because its Planck radiation temperature of -80C (15 microns) isn't heat." - T.L. Winslow (1953-)

"Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry." - Michael Brant Shermer (1954-)

"Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans." - Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958-)

"The good thing about Science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." - Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958-)

"So dark the con of man (Madonna on the Rocks)." - Dan Brown (1964-), The Da Vinci Code (2003)

"Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong." - Gregg Easterbrook's Law of Doomsaying

"Anyone who routinely takes on denialists, as I've been doing for decades now, should rapidly realise that there are four basic types of motivation. In order of numbers I would say most are A) right wing/libertarian deniers B) left wing deniers C) fundamentalist Christian deniers and, finally D) Galileo wannabes." - Nick Palmer

"Climate scientists missed a lot about a quarter century ago when they predicted how bad global warming would be. They missed how bad wildfires, droughts, downpours and hurricanes would get. They missed how much ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland would melt and contribute to sea level rise. They missed much of the myriad public health problems and global security issues. Global warming is faster, more extensive and just plain worse than they once thought it would be, scientists say now." - Seth Borenstein, Nov. 29, 2018

"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible." - IPCC Third Assessment Report (later removed)

"I should like to close by citing a well-recognized cliche in scientific circles. The cliche is 'In God we trust, others must provide data'." - Edwin R. Fisher, 1978

"The amount of energy necessary to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." - Alberto Brandolini

"Climate change is ethics for the wealthy: It legitimizes great accumulations of wealth. Pledging to combat it immunizes climate-friendly corporate leaders and billionaires from being targeted as members of the top one-tenth of the top one percent. This signifies a profound shift in the nature and morality of capitalism." - Rupert Darwall, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex

"It's true! It's true! The crown has made it clear./ The climate must be perfect all the year./ A law was made a distant moon ago here:/ July and August cannot be too hot./ And there's a legal limit to the snow here/ In Camelot./ The winter is forbidden till December/ And exits March the second on the dot./ By order, summer lingers through September/ In Camelot./ Camelot! Camelot!/ I know it sounds a bit bizarre,/ But in Camelot, Camelot/ That's how conditions are./ The rain may never fall till after sundown./ By eight, the morning fog must disappear./ In short, there's simply not/ A more congenial spot/ For happily-ever-aftering than here/ In Camelot." - Alan Jay Lerner (1918-86), King Arthur's Camelot, 1960

"God, grant me the serenityto accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference." - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Serenity Prayer, 1933

"To a patient scientist, the unfolding greenhouse mystery is far more exciting than the plot of the best mystery novel. But it is slow reading, with new clues sometimes not appearing for several years... Impatience increases when one realizes that it is not the fate of some fictional character, but of our planet and species, which hangs in the balance as the great carbon mystery unfolds at a seemingly glacial pace." - D. Schindler, 1999

"Climate denial is a movement that strongly support freedom of speech... because it is the only way that they can justify the constant lies that they post." - Gerald Kutney, U.N. IPCC Twitter (X) propagandist



"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." - 2 Peter 3:10

“As long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." - Genesis 8:21-22

"When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, 'Come and see!' I looked, and behold, there was before me a pale horse, and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following close behind him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth." - Book of Revelation 6:7-8

"The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." - Book of Revelation 8:7

"And the heathen (the nations) raged, but Your wrath (retribution, indignation) came, the time when the dead will be judged and Your servants the prophets and saints rewarded — and those who revere (fear) Your name, both low and high and small and great—and [the time] for destroying the corrupters of the earth." - Book of Revelation 11:18

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea." - Book of Revelation 21:1




TLW's Climatescope

Historyscoper Home Page







© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved.