The Panic Virus Quotes

“Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“In the fall of 2004, after both WMDs and easy victory were revealed as mirages, a presidential aide made an astounding admission to The New York Times Magazine. The White House, he said, didn’t waste time worrying about those “in what we call the reality-based community” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide said, “is not the way the world really works anymore. . . . When we act, we create our own reality.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy

“One of the first effects of this hyper-democratization of data was to unmoor information from the context required to understand it. On the Internet, facts float about freely and are recombined more according to the preferences of intuition than the rules of cognition:”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy

“Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe, and where striving for the truth is recognized as the most noble quest humankind will ever undertake.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“As Max grows older, I hope that...he will feel empowered to make his own decisions and will have the self-confidence to challenge traditional wisdom. I also hope that he learns the difference between critical thinking and getting swept up in a wave of self-righteous hysteria, and I hope he considers the effects of his actions on those around him. Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe...”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“Then, as now, anti-vaccination forces fed on anxiety about the individual’s fate in industrialized societies; then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control; then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy

“Combined with the self-reinforcing nature of online communities and a content-starved, cash-poor journalistic culture that gravitates towards neat narratives at the expense of messy truths, this disdain for actualities has led to a world with increasingly porous boundaries between facts and beliefs, a world in which individualized notions of reality, no matter how bizarre or irrational, are repeatedly validated.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear