Quotes About Skepticism

Questioners are often puzzled by others' willingness to act without sound reasons.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my own doubt.

Doute. Pire que la négation.

My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of Beranger! My credo is the credo of Rousseau!

Je suis mystique au fond, et je ne crois à rien

Bouvard thought: 'Ah, progress, what a farce!' He added: 'And politics, what a filthy mess!' 

Bouvard and Pécuchet put forward their abominable paradoxes on other occasions. They cast doubt on the honesty of men, the chastity of women, the intelligence of the government, the good sense of the people, in a word undermined the basic principles.

Some people are Freethinkers from sheer stupidity. My Uncle Sosthenes was one of these. Some people are often religious for the same reason.

One look at Scott was enough to tell you that the twig between his legs hadn't had its bark peeled back in a coon's age. Mr. Secretary ought to read Surgeon Kittson's annual

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. - H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken

Vorsicht ist die erste Sorge jener, die gelegentliche Scharlatanerie und Betrug gewöhnt sind.

One of the great tragedies of modern education is that most people are not taught to think critically. The majority of the world's people, those of the West included, are taught to believe rather than to think. It's much easier to believe than to think. People seldom think seriously about that which we are taught to believe, because we are all creatures of imitation and habit.