Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes

The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: “The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.”

If this were a court of law, the jury would now have ruled the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But science is not a courtroom, and environmental problems involve far more than science.

If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake.

for if science is about studying the world as it actually is—rather than as we wish it to be—then science will always have the potential to unsettle the status quo.

those in power will always seek to control history, because whoever controls the past controls the present.

Science was showing that Isaiah Berlin was right: liberty for wolves does indeed mean death to lambs.