“We are always mentioning people, and in that very instant they appear before us. We laugh and say, 'speak of the devil' and so forth and there we drop it. It is a cheap and convenient way of disposing of a grave and puzzling mystery. The fact is it does seem to happen too often to be an accident.”
(Mark Twain)
“I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time I realized it bordered on crime.”
(Houdini, on preforming medium acts)
“.
. . things that did not really happen . . . which only took place on
some boundary between real experience and fantasy. . .”
(Blake,
“The Poison Tree”)
“Innocent
lives are taken, and by a new alchemy gold and silver coined from
human blood.”
(Cornelious
Loos, on witchcraft trials)
“I'll
readily speak your wine [aka desire].”
(Jacotte
Colin, offering to confess to witchcraft)
“God's
death witch, if you budge I will smash both your eyes with my stool.”
(Demenge
Grand Cole, to a supposed witch)
“.
. .relatively few correct predictions are heralded and therefore
widely remembered, while the much more numerous incorrect predictions
are conveniently forgotten or de-emphasized. . ."
(Prof. John Allen Paulos,
on the 'Jeane Dixon Effect') “Even the dark side of the human imagination demonstrates our unity.”
(Dominic Alexander, Spellbound, on accusations of black magic)
“So
far as we can see, all that is proved is that some record of life on
Earth is laid up in some unearthly archives, and that under the right
circumstances, this record is accessible to the minds of the living.”
('Review'
on spirits and psychics)
“Magic
was a kind of technology to control the supernatural.”
(Dominic
Alexander, Spellbound)_
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