Ben Goldacre > Quotes

“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

“I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.”
― Ben Goldacre

“You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

“I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity,”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.”
― Ben Goldacre

“…sometimes you need to be imaginative about what kinds of research you do, compromise and be driven by the questions that need answering, rather than the tools available to you.”
― Ben Goldacre

“We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup?”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“Randomisation is not a new idea. It was first proposed in the seventeenth century by John Baptista van Helmont, a Belgian radical who challenged the academics of his day to test their treatments like blood-letting and purging (based on ‘theory’) against his own, which he said were based more on clinical experience: ‘Let us take out of the hospitals, out of the Camps, or from elsewhere, two hundred, or five hundred poor People, that have Fevers, Pleurisies, etc. Let us divide them into half, let us cast lots, that one half of them may fall to my share, and the other to yours … We shall see how many funerals both of us shall have.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.”
― Ben Goldacre

“This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering.”
― Ben Goldacre