Quotes About Skepticism

Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience.

Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth.

The blacks now suspected him of being an ally—though not a friend, never a friend!

TROUPE: Do you have any feelings about yuppies? BALDWIN: I saw them coming. I knew them. They can't, I'm afraid, be taught anything.

I supposed he wouldn't start doubting her until he started doubting everything.

It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. --"They Can't Turn Back," in Mademoiselle (New York, Aug. 1960; repr. in The Price of the Ticket, 1985)     The

A wise man prepares for treachery.

But I tell you, I did some real fretting, and honestly, if it hadn't been for the fact that God and I parted company so long ago, I might have even been sap enough to pray for him.

Trust wolves before you trust dashing and fawning young men.

There is a publication classification in an upper corner. It reads Religion. I'm immediately skeptical <...> because I've always group books such as this in a category with crap like Astrology, Aromatherapy, Crystalology, Pyramid Power, Psychic Healing and Feng Shui <...> that anyone would actually believe that these things could solve their problems, really solve them, instead of just making them forget about them for a while, is asinine to me...

I don't believe she's in Heaven and I don't believe she's in a better place. She's dead and when we're dead, we're gone. There are no blinding lights, there is no happy music, there are no Angels waiting to greet us.

Nullius in verba was the Royal Society's motto. Don't take anyone's word for it.

There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.

I'm uncomfortable, frankly, with the hype about Africa. We went from one extreme... to, like, Africa now is the best thing after sliced bread.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

Such as have reason, understanding, or common sense, will, and ought to make use of it in those things that concern themselves and their posterity, and suspect the words of such as are interested in deceiving or persuading them not to see with their own eyes.

It goes back in the black community that the police are not your friends. That's an old, old, deep understanding that we have, that it's going to take a lot to undo that in our minds.

We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time.

I'm not an economist, but I have spent time around thousands of small-business owners and investors, and I remain skeptical - despite the best intentions of the Fed - that even lower interest rates can make a meaningful dent in our unemployment problem.