Quotes About Skepticism

We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.2.

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

Buzzards don't make good friends. They always have an interior motive.

Whereas Hume's normative skepticism is moderate: it is part of his psychological naturalism that it is not in our power to control our beliefs by acts of mind and will, for our beliefs are causally determined largely by other forces in our nature. He urges us to try to suspend our beliefs only when they go beyond those generated by the natural propensities of what he calls custom and imagination (custom here is often a stand-in for the laws of association of ideas).

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

You can't trust even thieves these days.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Just because all the rats are gone doesn't mean I trust the rattlesnake that got rid of them.

People who are not in love may lightly laugh at lovers; and yet true love is a genuine and a noble thing for all that.

the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else ( with few, or no exceptions ) was either an enemy or a bore.

The author has endeavored to combat their theory in the manner in which Diogenes confuted the skeptical reasonings against the possibility of motion; remembering that Diogenes's argument would have been equally conclusive, though his individual perambulations might not have extended beyond the circuit of his own tub.

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics of religion.

In the present age—which has been described as "destitute of faith, but terrified at skepticism"—in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society.

My friend Oz Katerji once saw a great line of graffiti in Beirut that can work for every war reporter in every war: 'I don't believe in anything. I am just here for the violence.

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

He then waved for me to come over and follow him into this cave entrance. I really didn't want to do that, I mean, I didn't know this guy from Adam. I have no clue what he is doing here, and following him into a small cave didn't seem to be my idea of using my coconut properly. As

Never trust anybody who says 'trust me.' Except just this once, of course. - from Steel Beach

decisions. A July 2002 New York Times/CBS News poll revealed that 45 percent of Americans thought "other people are really running the government."20 Following

Love the optimism, doubt the reality.

To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

That'll be the day!

The young men of this generation mock the words of age; it would be well if they mocked nothing else; but what can we expect of those who doubt all and believe nothing?