Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science is a book by biologist Paul R. Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, published in 1994. Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save the "academic left" from itself by exposing misuses and abuses of science to advance political goals.
The book inspired the Sokal hoax.
Famous quotes containing the words higher, academic, left, quarrels and/or science:
“The higher one climbs the lonelier one is.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Personally I think we’re over-specialized. Why it’s getting so we have experts who concentrate only on the lower section of a specimen’s left ear.”
—Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Clete Ferguson (John Agar)
“If my intentions were not to be read in my eyes and voice, I should not have survived so long without quarrels and without harm, seeing the indiscreet freedom with which I say, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms.... Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)