Top 40 James Randi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.”

— James Randi

2. “No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.”

— James Randi

3. “No amount of belief makes something a fact.”

— James Randi

4. “Blind belief can be comforting, but it can easily cripple reason and productivity, and stop intellectual progress.”

— James Randi

5. “Expose every belief to the light of reason, discourse, facts, scientific observations; question everything, be sceptical because this is the only chance at life you will ever get.”

— James Randi

6. “I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”

— James Randi

7. “There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.”

— James Randi

8. “To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.”

— James Randi

9. “Nature doesn’t cheat – people do.”

— James Randi

10. “We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.”

— James Randi

11. “Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence.”

— James Randi

12. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world; they tell you they’re gonna fool you, and then they do it.”

— James Randi

13. “The market for nonsense is infinite.”

— James Randi

14. “Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $1,000,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe.”

— James Randi

15. “We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.”

— James Randi

16. “Death is the ultimate disappointment.”

— James Randi

17. “The New Age? Its just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds.”

— James Randi

18. “Feeling better is not actually being better.”

— James Randi

19. “I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.”

— James Randi

20. “Nostradamus himself confessed that the vague manner in which he wrote his “prophecies” was so that ‘they could not possibly be understood until they were interpreted after the event and by it.’”

— James Randi

21. “The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it’s false data. Scientists aren’t used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.”

— James Randi

22. “The only difference is that religion is much better organized and has been around much longer, but it’s the same story with different characters and different costumes.”

— James Randi

23. “Heroin also makes people feel better, but I wouldn’t recommend using heroin.”

— James Randi

24. “People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.”

— James Randi

25. “A quick example of that is a woman who said she’d been healed of throat cancer where the faith healer admitted he touched her on the forehead.”

— James Randi

26. “One thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. To my innocent mind, ‘dead’ implies incapable of communicating.”

— James Randi

27. “I believe in the basic goodness of my species, because that appears to be a positive tactic and quality that leads to better chances of survival- and in spite of our foolishness, we seem to have survived.”

— James Randi

28. “No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer.”

— James Randi

29. “The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment.”

— James Randi

30. “Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.”

— James Randi

31. “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

— James Randi

32. “I do not expect that homeopathy will ever be established as a legitimate form of treatment, but I do expect that it will continue to be popular.”

— James Randi

33. “I can go into a lab and fool the rear ends off any group of scientists.”

— James Randi

34. “Escapology has one thing going for it that probably made Harry Houdini such a superstar in his day and a legend in the present. Everyone wants to escape from something. Taxes, contracts, illness, work, the multitude of burdens that we chafe under are shadows from which we want to escape.”

— James Randi

35. “However, I believe that it would be difficult to have legitimate scientists agree to participate.”

— James Randi

36. “I don’t expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date.”

— James Randi

37. “I questioned her further, and eventually got to talk to her doctor. And her doctor sort of shook his head and he said, I have examined her for throat cancer at least 15 times in the past few years.”

— James Randi

38. “They would have been very let down if they had to leave the theater and he had missed. He would feel badly. Everyone would feel badly. But he never let them down.”

— James Randi

39. “There’s something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear – about the escape act in general.”

— James Randi

40. “On the contrary, to know that you are an individual not put here for some mysterious reason by some supernatural means, and that you are not protected by unknown powers or beings; to know that you are a product of millions of experiments in the evolutionary process and not the result of a seed thrown on this planet by extraterrestrials – that, to me, is very exciting.”

— James Randi

41. “Ben Franklin said it well: “Quacks are the greatest liars in the world, except their patients.”

— James Randi