Merchants of Doubt Quotes
James Hansen: What we're up against is people who have a preferred answer, and so then they take the position of a lawyer. They're going to defend their client and they will only present you with the data that favors their client.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Bob Inglis: You don't have to accept things the way they are. There are things we can do to change. The lie is that we can't do it. That we can't innovate.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
[first lines] Himself - Magician and Magic Historian: My expertise is in deception. The thing that sets magicians apart from con men, and other kinds of thieves and liars, is that we are honest liars. It's the moral contract.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Himself - Magician and Magic Historian: I know how to fool people. Add I know how to recognise when people are being fooled.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Himself - Magician and Magic Historian: I make an honest living, right? Therefore it offends me when someone takes the skills of my honest living, if you will, and uses it to twist and distort and manipulate people and their sense of reality.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Steve Milloy: Dioxins, pesticides, chemicals in general - there is no evidence that these are harming us.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Stanton A. Glantz: Faced with undeniable evidence that smoking was killing people they did what any self-respecting big corporation would do. They hired a public relations firm. And Hill and Knowlton said to the heads of all the big tobacco companies: You can't deny the evidence. You can't say smoking doesn't cause cancer. But what you can do is cast doubt.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
John Passacantando: What you're seeing here from the coal industry is perfectly analogous to what the tobacco industry used to do. They refused to change. They're trying to convince us that it's actually good for us. The way they used to say, Luckys make you healthy.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Herself - Professor of the History of Science: We got a list of all the papers that had been published from 1992 to 2002 that had used they key word phrase global climate change. And then we read them. The question was, How many of these papers *disagree* that most of the observed warming is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations? I certainly thought we would get some that disagreed. And when we found *nothing*, then I thought, Oh, this is a result that needs to be published.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt
Herself - Professor of the History of Science: When my article got published, I received emails that threatened me, that said I was a communist, that I should be fired from my job. And when I started to research the people who were attacking me, that's when I discovered a startling fact: They were the same people who had attacked the scientists on all these different issues, like acid rain or the ozone hole.
Movie: Merchants of Doubt