Quotes About Skepticism

If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge.

Skepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

Una de las lecciones más tristes de la historia es ésta: si se está sometido a un engaño demasiado tiempo, se tiende a rechazar cualquier prueba de que es un engaño.

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity.

Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well.

In a time haunted by drought, plague, and war, with no social or medical services available to the average person, with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, skeptical thinking was rare.

We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors, and producers—swept up with the rest of us—will shy away from real skeptical scrutiny. He won't be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he'll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos's.

T]he going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high level [...] conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us.

There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted to not be sure.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follow from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true

through lowered educational standards, declining intellectual competence, diminished zest for substantive debate, and social sanctions against skepticism, our liberties can be slowly eroded and our rights subverted.

the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters to sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in depth.

If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor

Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.

Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives—and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism.

People's feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly

cuando hierve el fanatismo a nuestro alrededor, los hábitos de pensamiento familiares de épocas antiguas toman el control.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure—in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.