Quotes About Skepticism

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.

I am told so many ill things of a man, and I see so few in him, that I begin to suspect he has a real but troublesome merit, as being likely to eclipse that of others.

When a man comes to me and tries to convince me that he is not a thief, then I take care of my coppers.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.

Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else unless it is an enemy.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

It is necessary for men to be deceived in religion.

Be fond of the man who jests at his scars, if you like; but never believe he is being on the level with you.

Believe nothing a man tells you and everything he shows you

A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.

A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.