Quotes About Doubt

Unlike his father, however, his self-confidence was a fragile bloom, easily crushed.

a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent

Larry Kudlow, the president's chief economic adviser, had been questioning the seriousness of the situation. He couldn't square the apocalyptic forecasts with the bouyant stock market. "Is all the money dumb?" he wondered. "Everyone's asleep at the switch? I just have a hard time believing that."*

One day it seemed like a good idea, the next day it didn't. That kind of thing happened all the time, way back when, because strategy was fluid. Or because nobody had the faintest idea what they were doing.

Sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it.

He looked at them and wondered if they were the fools, or if he was.

Try Keever again. Just in case." "I don't want to. I don't want to hear him not answer." "He's either OK or he isn't. Calling him or not calling him doesn't change anything.

All he could hear was a small voice inside his head that was saying you were wrong. Completely wrong. It was a voice he had heard before, but that didn't make it any easier to hear again, because he had built his whole career on hearing it fewer times than the next guy. It was like a box score in his mind, and his average had just taken some serious damage. Which upset him. Not because of vanity. It upset him because he was a professional who was supposed to get things right.

Too many ifs, Reacher thought. And too few answers.

burglary for?

Reacher] moved the mouse and sent the arrow up toward the icons. He knew they were files. Or file folders. You had to click on them, and in response they would open. He was never sure whether you had to click once or twice. He had seen it done both ways. His usual habit was to click twice. If in doubt, etcetera. Maybe it helped, and it never seemed to hurt. Like shooting someone in the head. A double tap could do no harm.

I have rules," Reacher said. "I have plenty of rules. One of which says a wounded veteran gets the benefit of the doubt. But another of which says always be gone before the government arrives. So I agree. We need to thread the needle.

They may never be able to prove it.

he would choose them if they weren't? "They know Holly pretty well," he said. "They're good enough." "Moaners and groaners?

I don't know how much longer we can keep on doing it. It doesn't feel like a job for life." "It might have been, for Keever." "That's very blunt.

But the smart money says we should act like I'm right. Just in case." "Like Pascal's Wager.

They're coming at it through the name. The big guy is all over town, asking questions." He got a long plastic crackle in exchange, calm, mellifluous, and reassuring. He said, "OK, sure," but he didn't sound sure, and then he hung up the phone.

Sometimes you woke up, and you knew for sure, from history and experience and weary intuition, that the brand new day would bring nothing good at all.

It's always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right, either you bring us back, or you don't, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they're not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.

Besides, how could I trust them, when I couldn't even trust myself?

if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.

Through doubt we can learn more than through naive trust

I started out as an atheist, utterly convinced that God didn't create people but that people created God in a pathetic effort to explain the unknown and temper their overpowering fear of death. My previous book, The Case for Christ, described my nearly two-year examination of the historical evidence that pointed me toward the verdict that God really exists and that Jesus actually is his unique Son. (For

wanted someone with integrity, someone who has grappled with the most potent critiques of the faith and who speaks authoritatively but without the kind of sweeping statements that conceal rather than deal with critical issues.