John Leonard - Science Quotes

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The magicians of the 19th century, enthralled by the science of optics, photography and electricity, opened the door to motion pictures and thereby rendered themselves obsolete. Any amateur with a pair of scissors can cut and edit a strip of film in order to make a woman vanish, sever a head, burn a body down to the skeleton and reverse time. Talent went out of style.… People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work.

John Leonard
In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods.

John Leonard
You can't invent yourself as you maunder on. Your fabrications aren't going to impress the blood test, the urinalysis or the chest X-ray. Science is not amused.

John Leonard
Everybody remembers his or her first magic show. Mine was in a garage in the dark. I passed out bowls of peeled grapes and described them as the devil's eyeballs. After that, by the light of a lantern on a wall of cinderblocks, there were card tricks and some pigeons we pretended to decapitate. The attraction of magic, to the amateur magician, derived from the fact that it wasn't magic at all; it was science in the service of illusion. Having sent in the magazine coupon and received our kit, we knew how everything worked toward achieving the ecstatic grasp.

John Leonard