Uri Geller Quotes

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?” I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?” “Sure,” she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, “What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?” I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!” They looked at me, horrified—I had blown my cover—and said, “It’s reflexology!” I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating. That’s just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn’t do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

One clear observation of Geller in action had an overpowering effect on me. I felt as if the whole framework with which I viewed the world had suddenly been destroyed. I seemed very naked an vulnerable, surrounded by a hostile iniverse. It was many days before I was able to come to terms with this sensation. Some of my collegues have even declined to face up to the problem by refusing to attend the demonstrations of such strange phenomena. That is a perfectly understandable position, but one that does not augur well for the future of science.

But, as Uri Geller seemed to demonstrate, certain talented individuals might possess “volitional control” such that they could impose some order on the usually random quantum motions. Some

Sometimes you waited at home in your room so demobilized into quiet that you could just about feel the maskingtape losing its stick and your mortifying teenaged posters of American moviestars who were 50% Jewish and Argentinian-German models who were 100% hot, Uri Malmilian (the football striker), Uri Geller (the mentalist), and Ha’Tzanchanim (the Paratroopers), peeling slowly from the walls.