Galileo's Middle Finger Quotes

“I’m aware of the stereotype many liberals have about conservative Catholics. The former believe the latter don’t think—that conservative religious people don’t care about facts and rigorous inquiry. But my conservative Catholic parents were thinkers. Twice as often as my parents told their four children to go wash, they told us to go look something up. At our suburban tract house on Long Island in the 1970s, our parents shelved the Encyclopædia Britannica right next to the dinner table so we could easily reach for a volume to settle the frequent debates. The rotating stack of periodicals in our kitchen included not only religiously oriented newsletters, but also the New York Times and National Geographic. Our parents took us to science museums, woke us up for lunar eclipses, and pushed us to question our textbooks and even our teachers when they sounded wrong.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“He explained to me that if people were allowed to use any criticism to neutralize reporters, the free press would die, and his editors understood that. I felt a glimmer of hope for the Fourth Estate.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.”
― Alice Domurat Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

“If we have any hope of maintaining freedom of thought and freedom of person in the near and distant future, we have to remember what the founding fathers knew: That freedom of thought and freedom of person must be erected together. That truth and justice cannot exist one without the other. That when one is threatened, the other is harmed. That justice, and thus morality, requires the empirical pursuit.”
― Alice Domurat Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

“Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America’s Founding Fathers were science geeks.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“the system being employed at the children’s hospital down the street from my grad-school apartment made the Victorian approach look relatively benign. The modern system featured not only highly aggressive cosmetic genital surgeries in infancy for children born with “socially inappropriate” genital variations like big clitorises, but also the withholding of diagnoses from patients and parents out of fear that they couldn’t handle the truth. It treated boys born with small penises as hopeless cases who “had” to be castrated and sex-changed into girls, and it assumed that the ultimate ability of girls to reproduce as mothers should take precedence over all else, including the ability to someday experience orgasm.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.”
― Alice Domurat Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“Human reasoning, she said—referring now explicitly to Socrates and Plato—human reasoning is imperfect. Human bias keeps us from perfect vision of what is happening around us. But the quest for truth—the quest to understand the world around us—must ultimately be how you enact the good.”
― Alice Domurat Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

“And people wouldn’t look up the details. They never look up the details.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“I couldn’t help but think hard about what you’re supposed to do when the facts seem to be leading you into danger.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“But as I grew up, I felt the tension one surely must feel when being simultaneously taught the importance of a specific dogma and the importance of freedom from dogma.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“All of these people were simply asking to be given basic rights that were automatically accorded to all other humans:”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice

“Before the Internet, cooler heads might have prevailed. (Insiders knew this was hardly Turner and Sponsel’s first attempt to pick at the big dog Chagnon.) Instead Turner and Sponsel’s juicy “tell all” letter wound up circulated all over the world virtually overnight, and of course the press didn’t dare sit on such a hot story long enough to find out what was true, much less learn the backstory. Most reporters simply reiterated the charges. A headline in The Guardian screamed, SCIENTIST “KILLED AMAZON INDIANS TO TEST RACE THEORY.” The quotation marks likely would be lost on much of the public.”
― Alice Dreger, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice