Quotes About Skepticism

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

You will find that the dullest, most functionally illiterate mental mushroom has a very definite, very "scientific" view on one thing: the impossibility of any kind of psychic phenomena.

If you don't trust anyone, they can't let you down.

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.

Alex probably brings his dates sharp knives as gifts, in case she'll need one when she's out on a date with him.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is...

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

I believe in everything until it's disproved.

People love advertising in particular but they hate advertising in general.

There's some invisible guy, up in the sky, who can kill you, because he loves you.

The position of the hysterical subject is that he or she always guesses what is behind the curtain, that is why such a subject usually ends up [...] giving up on love.

[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn't be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola's heart beat fastest for me.

Warum wollen sie unbedingt, dass ich den Auftrag storniere?' Der Mann klingt auf einmal misstrauisch. 'Seid ihr überbucht?' 'Ich will Ihnen nur helfen. Wirklich, unsere Kurse sind grottenschlecht. Es ist immer die gleiche Teamwork-Botschaft, nur unter verschiedenen Namen verpackt.' 'Ich hab nichts mit Teamwork bestellt. >Leitung von C++-Programmierern im Rahmen terminsensibler Projekte< - das wollte ich.' 'Das ist der Teamwork-Kurs. Und alle anderen sind auch der Teamwork-Kurs!

irony irritated him. There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either.

But I mean, c'mon! Magic potions? Tell me you wouldn't be losing it too!

Jesus, you'd think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every three months or so…ebola, SARS, avian flu. You know how many people made money on those scares? Shit, I made my first million on useless antiradiation pills during the dirty bomb scares.

The trick, he said over and over again in any number of contexts, is to disregard what everybody tells you until you have thought it through for yourself.

Crises will always drive some to faith and others to skepticism.

feelings bore me. is that a crime