Charles Fort

Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932) was a writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. (According to some sources he was born on August 9.)

Quotations

As a writer Fort was highly stylistic, blending passion and poetry, and his books are littered with quotes full of humor and insight.

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• "We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march."
• "Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing, that the suspicion comes to me that it may be only a myth after all."
• "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere"
• "I cannot accept that the products of the mind are subject-matter for belief"
• "I can conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is anything more than the proper thing to wear, for a while"
• "But my liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidence?"
• "In hosts of minds, today, are impressions that the word 'eerie' means nothing except convenience to makers of crossword puzzles. There are gulfs of the unaccountable, but they are bridged by terminology."
• "Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native."
• "The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open."
• "If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen."
• "Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on."
• "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property."