# Quote — Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science

> In a famous October 2004 New York Times article on the Bush administration, journalist Ron Suskind described his encounter with a “senior adviser” to the president:
>
> The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.”

- Author: [Chris Mooney](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney.md)
- Book: [The Republican War on Science](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science.md)
- Page: 243
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chris_Mooney#The_Republican_War_on_Science_(2005)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science/in-a-famous

## More from this book

> But if we care about science and believe that it should play a crucial role in decisions about our future, we must steadfastly oppose further political gains by the modern Right. This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation.

p. 255 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science/but-if-we-care.md)

> From acid rain to global climate change, from “creation science” to “intelligent design,” conservatives had been meddling with science for years, largely on behalf of their pro-industry and religiously conservative supporters.

p. 224 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science/from-acid-rain.md)

> “Healthy skepticism is an essential and treasured feature of scientific analysis,” Gibbons added. “But willful distortion of evidence has no place at the table of scientific inquiry.”

p. 59 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chris-mooney/the-republican-war-on-science/healthy-skepticism-is-an-essential.md)