Quotes About Skepticism

Now listen. You can't fool all the people all the time-- but I want you to try.

Young man, I am afraid you are wasting your time. If there were any more planets they would have been found long before this.

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.

All very well for you religious chaps to talk so, said Larry, but I'll turn a shilling when I can. I don't believe in religion,for I don't see that your religious people are any better than the rest.

Why do we trust one another so little? I know there must be a reason, but still I sometimes think it's horrible that you find you can never really confide in people, even in those who are nearest to you.

I didn't trust anyone but myself.

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

The success of the lie depends a great deal upon how much the hearer wishes to believe it," she replied.

He sneered with the impatience of people listening to the obvious lies of others.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

But Marchent, most journalists can't be trusted. You do know that, don't you?

Who could trust language?

Alienation, a lack of trust either in happiness or in others.

How could anyone ever trust Cary Grant, I wondered—a man who looked as though he were made entirely of wood?

I came because I could resist it. I came because perhaps I didn't quite believe in you. I didn't believe in spite of all I'd read and been told.

Too bad he took a tumble out that window when he was too drunk to know what he was doing, she said, cheerfully callous. It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever let a man near me again.

must say, if ever I do come across a man who seems to feel for me at all, I immediately assume he's actually quite shallow-hearted, so I have no need to expose myself to potential embarrassment.

I guess they've become so cynical that they expect to be cheated. These modern companies have things rigged to their advantage.

The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.

Don't listen to the cynics. They're cynics for a reason.

If you still believe that aliens would travel hundreds of light years to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, then your imagination is one of the seven wonders of the world, and should be bronzed.

As Dennis Lindley had argued, if someone attaches a prior probability of zero the hypothesis that the moon is made of green cheese, then the whole armies of astronauts coming back bearing green cheese cannot convince him.