The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe QUOTES

1 " [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. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

2 " 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. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

3 " My problem in replying to you is that Velikovsky always tosses with a two-headed coin. If ordinary orientalists like myself simply leave him aside & get on with real work, he complains of their disdain (& the public are left unprotected). If, conversely, orientalists like myself (who happen to be burdened with several thousands more facts than Velikovsky even dreams of) actually dare to stand up & expose him, then of course he snidely implies that we are some sort of closed caucus with interests at stake. It’s always “heads you lose, tails I win”…. Would you, I reflectively wonder, publish a book that insisted on the identity of Harold Wilson and Harold of Hastings, of Napoleon, Bismarck & Charlemagne, and on the role of your firm as secret HQ of the IRA, all as absolutely genuine historical fact, with “proofs” (e.g., all aunts in France are large, because tante is the feminine for tant)? Because that is, comparatively, the level of historical fraud that V. represents. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

4 " Honest dissent and unorthodox ideas often promote scientific knowledge. Even though more often wrong than right, unorthodox ideas are apt to stimulate some clear thinking among the orthodox. And from time to time, a doubter makes a basic discovery. But the lysenkoism is quite sterile of ideas and of suggestions for new experiments. It urges a retreat to archaic views, long abandoned with sufficient reason. In this, the lysenkoism is comparable only to the anti-evolutionism in the USA. New arguments and new facts mean just as little to the lysenkoists as they do to the anti-evolutionists. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

5 " Lysenkoism may be useful only because it provides a lesson. Whether we like it or not, the days of the independent scientist and of independent science are about over. The more important science becomes in the lives of individuals and of nations, the more it will need popular support and will have to submit to social control. But the forms and techniques of this support and control have not yet been devised and tested. The problem is a new one. The Soviet rulers have tried a solution, but their solution has resulted in lysenkoism, and thus proved to be a dismal failure. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

6 " The proof of “sudden” changes (p. 223 to the end) is quite convincing and meritorious. If you had done nothing else but to gather and present in a clear way this mass of evidence, you would have already a considerable merit. Unfortunately, this valuable accomplishment is impaired by the addition of a physical-astronomical theory to which every expert will react with a smile or with anger—according to his temperament; he notices that you know these things only from hearsay—and do not understand them in the real sense, also things that are elementary to him. . . . To the point, I can say in short: catastrophes yes, Venus no. "

― Michael D. Gordin , The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe