Quotes About Skepticism

Because, Lucius, without the discipline of philosophy to give rigour to their thinking, people can and will believe anything, no matter how absurd.

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.

Everyone who believes in psychokinesis raise my hand.

Faith is worth abandoning over the truth

It was neither welcoming nor antagonistic, just a question. I wondered if it would be easier to lie.

Trust you?" Varencienne laughed coldly. "I would as soon trust a shadow on the wind.

He sounded sceptical, but Othman sensed the hope in his words, that dreary, desperate hope. He smiled.

He was frightened of being seduced by this woman into believing she had their welfare at heart.

Don't fall for the glamour, beloved. We need our wits about us today.

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

Apparently I can't prove the chair I'm sitting on exists, because I only think it exists because my bum tells me it does and I can't empirically trust my bum to tell the truth...' 'That what it says?' 'Far as I can tell, one of the great philosophical minds of the eighteenth century thinks my arse is a liar.

Trump's Deep State is just a variation of Joe McCarthy's mythical Communists infesting the State Department, the "enemies within.

It could happen. People could be fooled. Memory is short.

The anthropologist who asserts absolute confidence in the sex, age, stature and ancestry of a skeleton is a dangerous and inexperienced scientist who doesn't understand human variability.

I distrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

She liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them.

As for Gaius, he has no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse dry-shod across the Gulf of Baiae.

I've read too many books to believe what I am told.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

You cannot fool all of the people, all of the time.

It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

I am so appalled by the whole social media thing. I don't get it; it doesn't appeal to me. Neither does a computer or working on a laptop.