Quotes About Skepticism

Clinical, brilliantly medical-minded Adam believes in fate. A fate with Fia.

Be careful. He uses that line on all the girls.

I'd rather meander through a pit of vipers than love one more person, but since I'm on the subject of snakes, we all know one, or are one.

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

If you hear a prominent economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*

The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.

Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because experts tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market.

probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker

As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue.

In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them. As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.

From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

science is about how not to be a sucker.

do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence.

One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans.