Quotes from Michael Shermer

These were all tragic misconceptions—factual errors that, had they been checked against reality, would have come up short. Nevertheless, they were sincerely believed; thus extermination had a kind of inescapable internal logic to it, however grotesque.

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.

Perspective-taking is the psychological foundation underlying the capacity for empathy. To judge the rightness or wrongness of an action against another, one must first take the perspective of that other sentient being.

This is not to minimize the emotional undercurrent of mindless bigotry, but merely to suggest that if you sincerely (however wrongly) believe that X is responsible for the ruination of all and everything that you hold dear, stamping out X follows like night follows day.

As the belletrist extraordinaire Christopher Hitchens once told me, mastering the pen and the podium means never having to dine or sleep alone.

highly secularised countries like Sweden and Denmark, where rates of religiosity are among the lowest in the world, seem not to have much death anxiety at all

What about the flip side of the economic ledger – the poor? Even Jesus gave up hope for them and offered only early entrance to heaven.

And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life. It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combined with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedom and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.

Photographs and videos are often misperceived and can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations: aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, helicopters, clouds, swamp gas, or even the planet Venus, which, if you are driving on an undulating highway away from city lights, really does appear to be a bright light following your car.

In the memorable observation by geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Another day in Turkey without a coup goes unreported, but just try to take over that country without the world's media covering it, along with millions of smartphone-carrying citizens video recording every incident

Behavioural economists have demonstrated experimentally that in order to get someone to take a gamble or to risk an investment, the potential pay-off must be about twice the potential loss. To get a person to toss a coin to win or lose $10 (students), or $10,000 (wealthy executives), the pay-off has to be greater than or equal to $20, or $20,000.

We are more willing to invest in defending what is already ours than we are to take what is someone else's, because the motivation to avoid losing what we already have is greater than the motivation of gaining what we don't yet have.

In an aptly titled article 'Two Rights Don't Make Up for a Wrong', the authors found that 'the overall goodness of a person is determined mostly by his worst bad deed.'35 Decades of devoted work for public causes can be obliterated in an instant with an extramarital affair, financial scandal or criminal act.

More evidence against abstinence-only programs may be gleaned from the 2013 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health published in the British Medical Journal and conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1995 and 2009 on more than seventy-eight hundred women; remarkably, it was discovered that 0.5 percent—or one in two hundred—of adolescent girls had reported that they'd become pregnant without sex. Are

as we age, (1) we take on more responsibilities, so we have a greater cognitive burden, (2) we become more vigilant about threats (especially as parents) and more sensitive to errors in youth ('kids these days!'), (3) while at the same time we lose the capacity to process information as quickly as we did when we were younger, and (4) we tend to attribute these changes in ourselves to changes in the external world.

No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought the younger generation's cave paintings were not up to the standard they had set.

When you have to murder people by the tens of millions to achieve your utopian dream, you have succeeded only in producing a dystopian nightmare.

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.

I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.