“[Published pseudoscience] is a serious threat to education and, I believe, to the democratic principle itself…. No amount of lying will alter the truth,—but lying can alter the willingness of a people to accept the truth.” ExpertisePseudoscience1950Post FactualTruthiness Book:The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe Source: The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
“Science may appear to have no connection with political freedom…. Scientists are too busy with positive measures, such as productive research and the dissemination of the results of the search for truth, to take time out to refute every crackpot notion that gets into print…. If the democratic process were applied ideally, and if enough people were to accept the claims in the article as truth, then publicly supported schools and universities could be depopulated of competent faculties, whose places could be taken by quacks and political appointees. Granted that the chance of this is very small, nevertheless the imagined situation has a modern precedent. Something very similar did happen (on purely political grounds) in a European country during several years preceding the second world war. It has happened in other countries since the end of that war.” DemocracyPublic EducationPseudoscienceAnti IntellectualismCrackpots1950 Book:The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe Source: The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe