Top 40 Ben Goldacre Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

— Ben Goldacre

2. “Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.”

— Ben Goldacre

3. “Torture the data, and it will confess to anything,” as.”

— Ben Goldacre

4. “The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It’s not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It’s about our beliefs and expectations. It’s about the cultural meaning of a treatment.”

— Ben Goldacre

5. “The plural of anecdotes is not data.”

— Ben Goldacre

6. “You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.”

— Ben Goldacre

7. “Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.”

— Ben Goldacre

8. “Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.”

— Ben Goldacre

9. “Transparency and detail are everything in science.”

— Ben Goldacre

10. “Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.”

— Ben Goldacre

11. “I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.”

— Ben Goldacre

12. “You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.”

— Ben Goldacre

13. “Yes. I’m a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.”

— Ben Goldacre

14. “I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out off my arsehole instead? Thank you. Anton.”

— Ben Goldacre

15. “Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.”

— Ben Goldacre

16. “Problems in medicine do not mean that homeopathic sugar pills work; just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn’t mean that magic carpets really fly.”

— Ben Goldacre

17. “If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have.”

— Ben Goldacre

18. “Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.”

— Ben Goldacre

19. “Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.”

— Ben Goldacre

20. “Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.”

— Ben Goldacre

21. “In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.”

— Ben Goldacre

22. “Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all.”

— Ben Goldacre

23. “George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.”

— Ben Goldacre

24. “Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.”

— Ben Goldacre

25. “Blood pressure readings are an inexact technique, like ECG interpretation, X-ray interpretation, pain scores, and many other measurements that are routinely used in clinical trials. I.”

— Ben Goldacre

26. “Pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science really works.”

— Ben Goldacre

27. “Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market, and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.”

— Ben Goldacre

28. “Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development.”

— Ben Goldacre

29. “Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy.”

— Ben Goldacre

30. “Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in World War II. Clothing conventions do change over time.”

— Ben Goldacre

31. “As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.”

— Ben Goldacre

32. “Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health.”

— Ben Goldacre

33. “We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup?”

— Ben Goldacre

34. “Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills that seem to work, and.”

— Ben Goldacre

35. “Doubt has also been cast on the value of McKeith’s certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, especially since Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre managed to buy the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.”

— Ben Goldacre

36. “The current regulations – for companies, doctors and researchers – create perverse incentives; and we’ll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice.”

— Ben Goldacre

37. “I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease.”

— Ben Goldacre

38. “There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they have much in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learned through experience; but both can be informed by the experience of others.”

— Ben Goldacre

39. “There are many ways in which journalists can mislead a reader with science: they can cherry-pick the evidence, or massage the statistics; they can pit hysteria and emotion against cold, bland statements from authority figures.”

— Ben Goldacre

40. “With this idea, with handwashing, with rehydration fluid, and with the methods and principles that gave us these ideas, a small group of softly-spoken saints have saved more people than you would meet in a thousand lifetimes.”

— Ben Goldacre

41. “Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.”

— Ben Goldacre

42. “When I go through busy periods of partying, drinking, sleep deprivation and convenience eating, I usually decide – eventually – that I need a bit of a rest. So I have a few nights in, reading at home, and eating more salad than usual. Models and celebrities, meanwhile, ‘detox’.”

— Ben Goldacre