The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive.

Charles Fort

Categorized in : Names Survival Stupidity

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 coincidences?

Charles Fort

pseudo what-if thinking

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

Charles Fort

psychological-needs believe people

The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.

Charles Fort

property farms earth

I think, therefore I'm going to have breakfast.

Charles Fort

breakfast thinking

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.

Charles Fort

mad data lying

[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

Charles Fort

stars wise art

One can't learn much and also be comfortable One can't learn much and let anybody else be comfortable

Charles Fort

comfortable

In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere.

Charles Fort

measuring circles

It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out.

Charles Fort

finals found

A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Charles Fort

forts data mean

If there is a true universal mind, must it be sane?

Charles Fort

universal sane mind

Peasants have believed in dowsing, and scientists used to believe that dowsing was only a belief of peasants. Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing that the suspicion comes to me that it may only be a myth after all.

Charles Fort

belief may believe

Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.

Charles Fort

hypnosis deceit people

I have taken the stand that nobody can be always wrong, but it does seem to me that I have approximated so highly that I am nothing short of a negative genius.

Charles Fort

errors taken science

When we come upon assurances that a mystery has been solved, we go on investigating.

Charles Fort

assurance mystery goes-on

Do you want power over something? Be more nearly real than it.

Charles Fort

real want

Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.

Charles Fort

stumps octopus way

There is not a physicist in the world who can perceive when a parlor magician palms off playing-cards.

Charles Fort

parlor-games cards world

I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.

Charles Fort

science-religion philosophy science

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

Charles Fort

fate doors science