Quotes About Skepticism

You're so full of shit," Transporter said. "I read a book on that—" Maestro cut him off. "You've read a book on everything, but if whoever wrote the fuckin' book didn't really know shit, then quoting them makes you look bad.

So we've gone from 'Don't trust anyone over thirty' to 'Don't drink any Scotch under thirty'? Is this what's become of your revolution?

The world will need sceptics after the war is over. Too many people are ready to believe anything they're told.

but you've been duped by a fake-news site.' The look of surprise on Maggie's face touched him. 'But how are people supposed to know that?' she asked, bewildered. That, thought Bryant, is what we're all wondering.

I know everyone thinks I'm difficult. It's just that as I've got older I've become less gullible. And that makes me harder to control. I don't listen to my peers anymore, but that's because most of them are either dead or have gone mad, so now I'm free to explore anything I want.

Not for reasons unknown!" Ripley said, again. One more time, she thought. The more she told her story, the less they seemed to believe it, and the more terrible it became to her. "I told you, we set down there on company orders to get this thing which destroyed my crew. And your expensive ship.

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness

The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].

The elementary rules of logic: that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

What can be asserted without proof can be dissmissed without proof.

I am so made that I cannot believe.

to experience a furious disillusionment with 'conventional' politics, a bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself.

Populists (and 'national socialists') look at the supposedly secret deals that run the world 'behind the scenes'. Child's play. Except that childishness is sinister in adults.

The "evidence" for faith, then, seems to leave faith looking even weaker than it would if it stood, alone and unsupported, all by itself. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the "evidence" eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.

This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. All the News That's Fit to Print, it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time. However, it is just as certain that we shall continue to cast a skeptical and ironic and even witty eye on what we have ourselves invented. If religion is innate in us, then so is our doubt of it and our contempt for our own weakness.

Our species will never run out of fools but I dare say that there have been at least as many credulous idiots who professed faith in god as there have been dolts and simpletons who concluded otherwise.