Quotes About Skepticism

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

For my mother, the world was full of opportunities for moral instruction. But I never knew her to get involved in a political campaign. Like my grandparents, she was suspicious of platforms, doctrines, absolutes, preferring to express her values on a smaller canvas.

It's what passes for wisdom, being ironic and cynical.

Not only did Americans tend to be skeptical of oil companies, but BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, was a walking PR disaster—stating in the media that the spill involved a "relatively tiny" amount of oil in "a very big ocean"; arguing in another interview that no one wanted to see the hole plugged more than him because "I'd like my life back"; and generally living up to every stereotype of the arrogant, out-of-touch multinational executive.

a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

Many of the veteran diplomats and experts they talked to were predictably skeptical of the need for any change to U.S. policy, arguing that as unsavory as some of our Arab allies might be, the status quo served America's core interests—something that wasn't guaranteed if more populist governments took their place.

Still, it wasn't until February 10, 2011, the day before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt, that this absurd theory really got traction. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Trump hinted that he might run for president, asserting that "our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy.

When I see Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously. I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.

America has historically offered space for all sorts of sects, cults, faith healers, and purveyors of snake oil, and those that are profitable, like positive thinking, tend to flourish.

La mayoría elegiríamos a un médico que esté dispuesto a investigar si el diagnóstico podría ser el peor posible, en vez de uno que llegue enseguida a la conclusión de que todo está fenomenal.

Don't bargain with them, Jamie,' said the old man again. 'Don't help them, don't believe them, don't let them live one moment beyond what it takes to destroy them safely. No matter what they tell you, about why it is so necessary that you help them do whatever it is they're asking you to help them do. They are lying.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.

why, he very nearly almost looked handsome. If you could ignore the telltale signs that he is a certified creep.

Tig widened her eyes at Willa, suggesting she might be overdoing it.

She was suspicious of anyone who was pushing not one, not two, but three male-led religions rolled into one.

I left. I told myself again I wasn't disappointed, I wasn't even terribly surprised. I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing. I told myself it was good to get some further confirmation of the essential accuracy of my worldview.

She's a bargirl. You don't know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me—I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn't needed to warn me about the bugs. My gut told me she wasn't dissembling.

I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn't thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn't bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn't have been like her not to respond. But the thank-you might have been automatic, sent even in the presence of continued suspicions. It could even have been duplicitous, intended to lull Harry into thinking she was satisfied when in fact the opposite was true.

My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn't give a damn.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

German scholar and skeptic Gerd Lüdemann argues that the visions of Jesus experienced by Peter, and then later by Paul, were psychologically induced.

Precisely those conservative evangelical scholars who claim that mass hallucinations don't happen are the ones who deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to hundreds or thousands of people at once, even though we have modern, verified eyewitness testimony that she has.

Skepticism is demanding evidence before believing; cynicism is not believing even with evidence