Quotes About Skepticism

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.

When people praise a poem that I can't understand I always think they're lying.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

If they's interested, they wouldn't believe it. If they believed it, they'd arrest me.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

If Mephistopheles climbed up the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?" huffed a newspaper of Germany's outflanked liberals.

Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed.

Be true, unbeliever.

Anyone who tells you he knows the mind of God is selling something. You can take that to the bank.

The problem with most people who say they believe, however, is that said belief is only a thin layer of solid ice which rests over a vast ocean that is likewise deep with non-solid disbelief.

Many wealthy people donate, and while the skeptical may claim that they do so for tax breaks, there is another reason involved … as a spiritual practice.

I had not learned anything about Huntley that would have alerted me to what he was. I had no reason, as an 11-year-old girl, to be wary of him. No one said, 'This guy likes to have sex with young girls.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

Henry Halleck was a pedant and a military bureaucrat, but he was not an easy man to fool,

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

Eddie knelt and lifted a rock. 'Lawyers,' he whispered.

Looking at this town with an honest eye was like biting into candy with a mouthful of cavities.

Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.

Vaddern was trying hard to be the guy on the white horse, but I was'nt ready, just yet, to play the trust game

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows that the good guys lost —LEONARD COHEN, "Everybody Knows," 1988

public opinion surveys consistently show that people are pro-science as a mode of inquiry, but anti-science as a mode of authority.

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.