Carl Sagan: “The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.”
“Wonder and Skepticism”, Skeptical Inquirer 19 (1), January-February 1995, ISSN 0194-6730
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.* - Carl Sagan, 1995, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Chapter 13: “Obsessed with Reality”, Page 229
Joseph Campbell
Lecture I.1.4 - New Horizons
November 16, 1961TRACK 4: Society’s Choice: Tradition or Truth?
Now this is a very serious affair. It is serious because these symbolic worlds were the supports of the civilizations, of the moralities of the civilizations, of the self-confidence of the civilizations, of the vitality and creative power of the civilizations. And with the cutting down, the frustrating of the self-confidence that derives from images of this kind, there is a disequilibrium within the society itself. And everyone is challenged in his loyalty—are you going to be loyal to the tradition, to the form, to the morality and myth of your society, or are you going to be loyal to truth? They are two different things.
Lecture I.1.4 - New Horizons
https://www.jcf.org/works/downloads/lecture-i-1-4-new-horizons/
https://open.spotify.com/album/3jEyxUxO2F1rlF7DQHXBEB
NOTE: jcf .org broke their link? Why. Not impressed at all that they don’t maintain links from August 2021. I think it is a disservice to the world, humankind, that they have not made these lectures from a man who died in 1987 public domain for the sake of world peace. And what money they gather for their foundation doesn’t seem to go towards getting the word out to Star Wars fans, etc.
“Mankind naturally and generally love to be flatter’d: Whatever sooths our Pride, and tends to exalt our Species above the rest of the Creation, we are pleas’d with and easily believe, when ungrateful Truths shall be with the utmost Indignation rejected. “What! bring ourselves down to an Equality with the Beasts of the Field! with the meanest part of the Creation! 'Tis insufferable!” But, (to use a Piece of common Sense) our Geese are but Geese tho’ we may think ‘em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho’ it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.”
“A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain” (1725).