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Uri Geller

Israeli illusionist

Uri Geller (born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli illusionist, internationally known as a magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic.

I don't care what those schmucks think. I'm a millionaire.
I can say with absolute certainty I do not cheat. I am not a magician.

Quotes

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  • "Like I told you, I'm not a magician," he says. "If something isn't working, I don't try to guess."
    • Cited by Calev Ben-David, "A Life of the Mind," The Jerusalem Report (September 8, 1994), p. 46
  • My boss treated me like a slave and I felt completely degraded. Then, just once, I did a terrible thing - I peed in his tea! Watching him drink it, my grudges completely dissolved - I never minded making tea for him again.
    • From an interview by Rae Lewis "Uri Geller recalls his pre-spoon-bending days", Evening Standard (London, November 2, 1998)
  • I can say with absolute certainty I do not cheat. I am not a magician.
  • I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer. I want to do a good show. My entire character has changed.
    • Interview in Magische Welt, November 2007; cited by James Randi, "Geller Reversal", SWIFT, 18 January 2008 [1]

About Uri Geller

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Listed in alphabetical order by author or source.
  • I went to a number of homes around the country, sometimes with my own spoons in my pocket, or I would select one at random from the family kitchen. Typically it was a boy under ten years of age who would lightly stroke the metal object at the narrow point of the handle while I held it between thumb and forefinger at the end of the handle. The spoon would soon slowly bend, creating two 360-degree twists in the handle, perfectly emulating what Geller demonstrated on television. No tricks, no magic potions, just innocent children (with normal children's fingers) who had not yet learned that it could not be done. (Professor John Hasted, Chairman of the Department of Physics at Birkbeck College in London, also conducted extensive experiments with children in England, as did physicist Ted Bastin. Both found numerous children who could bend the metal without any physical contact.) The evidence continued to mount in this way, suggesting that these strange capabilities were quite natural and likely common in humans, though latent and seldom manifest. It occurred to me that we were possibly seeing the emergence of an evolutionary attribute, or the residue from an earlier one that was now fading.
  • Those responding to Geller's phenomenon by "bending forks" themselves, were following the same pattern. Their ego "roof-brain" had nothing to do with it (and they also hadn't yet learned fully enough that the act was impossible).
  • Time did a devastating hatchet job on Uri Geller (and others). Time selected those events and circumstances thoroughly discrediting Geller. Time also grouped such meticulous researchers as Charles Tart with highly suspect and careless showmen, tarring all with the same brush. Guilt by association is hardly objective journalism. Nevertheless most "nonordinary" phenomena are subjective and not amenable to cultural "prediction and control." This has been one issue of my book. Should Geller-type material become fully acceptable within such channels of the culture such as Time, we would know that the cultural force would have absorbed, and not destroyed, the Crack-sign value of such phenomena. When those working in the field of "nonordinary" phenomena stop trying to prove to the Establishment, they will make a great leap forward. Anonymity is the direction.
 
Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way. ~ James Randi
  • The weakness of the attack lies in its lack of discrimination. It is possible that psychic surgery is a hoax, that plants cannot really read our minds, that Kirlian photography (photographing the "life-aura" of living creatures) may depend on some simple electrical phenomenon. But to lump all of these together as if they were all on the same level of improbability shows a certain lack of discernment. The same applies to the list of "hoaxes." Rhine's careful research into extrasensory perception at Duke University is generally conceded to be serious and sincere, even by people who think his test conditions were too loose. The famous fairy photographs are quite probably a hoax, but no one has ever produced an atom of proof either way, and until someone does, no one can be quite as confident as the editors of Time seem to be. And Ted Serios has never at any time been exposed as a fraud — although obviously he might be. We see here a phenomena that we shall encounter again in relation to Geller: that when a scientist or a "rationalist" sets himself up as the defender of reason, he often treats logic with a disrespect that makes one wonder what side he is on.
  • The things that always seem to work are the things that any magician can duplicate. Randi's quite right to point that out. But that's not because I'm doing a conjuring trick. You'd think that whatever causes these things to happen doesn't want them to be proved.
  • I have never claimed that Geller was authentic, or that the Society had any opinion as to Geller's authenticity. I only said that I know of no way that he could have used trickery to do these things. That is a fact.
    • Artur Zorka in "Official Report: Society of American Magicians" reprinted in The Geller Papers, p. 166
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