Quotes About Skepticism

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.

I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.

Don't be a hero, young man. There's no percentage in it.

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.

Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it.

The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn't have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. They're topped by too many smart minds.

I suppose you do this to all the clients," she said softly.

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)

You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.

I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don't know much about cops.

We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.

Informants can be helpful, but they are never infallible. All tools can break, or be turned into weapons.

There is no magic, only tricks.

A small bad intention is often far more easily believed than a big one, Magnificence

If any god helps me, I'll welcome it, but I'd also be surprised.

A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with yes but. Naysaying becomes a habit.

Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete," the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked.

Some guys - a lot of guys - don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they eat or drink or think or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if I saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying 'Jesus, that was a great special effect.' The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.

Die Definition eines Arschlochs ist ein Mensch, der nicht glaubt, was er sieht.

Rand Foxworth hat mir erzählt, er hätte die Grippe, aber Foxworth lügt so, wie alte Leute ficken.