Quotes About Skepticism

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

We can't quite decide if the world is growing worse, or if the reporters are just working harder.

Be cautious in your intercourse with the great; they seldom confer obligations on their inferiors but from interested motives. Friendly they appear as long as it serves their turn, but they will render no assistance in time of actual need.

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

Cuando se afirma y se subraya tal cosa sin que tal diferencia resulte de las palabras mismas, y cuando en lugar de ello, las palabras se refieren precisamente a lo que niegan tales afirmaciones, surge la sospecha de que en tales palabras se esconde precisamente lo negado. Por lo tanto, no hay que creer demasiado en esas afirmaciones.

Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.

I am for such a League [of Nations] provided we don't expect too much from it. . . . I am not willing to play the pan which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then forthwith eaten by the wolves.

What I cannot understand about the Russian is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.

You can't be 100 per cent certain of anything.

I didn't trust men. I wanted to trust them because I knew there must be some good men in the world, but the ones I'd known had lied to my face while plotting acts of violence. Women could be bitches, but men were the ones who seemed the most capable of crimes without mercy.

Religion is all bunk.

I have no way of knowing that it's not just some kind of feel-good hoax set up to make customers think the vendor cares while they actually discard the submissions.

When I hear someone touting the cloud as a magic-bullet for all computing problems, I silently replace "cloud" with "clown" and carry on with a zen-like smile.

Miracles are signs not to them that believe, but to them that believe not.

By June 1943 King became cautiously optimistic. In a letter to Vice Admiral Andrews he wrote, "The U-boat situation looks very encouraging for the time being. In these matters I am afraid I am a hard-boiled skeptic — but I am always glad to be disappointed in my pessimism!

Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove that it's not.

If we grabbed a materialist by the throat and squeezed very hard so he could not breathe, would it prove to his lungs that there is no such thing as air without a throat?

Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.

If Jesus Christ were to come today people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he has to say, and make fun of it.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief

So how do we know anything at all, if in fact we do know anything at all?

People are negative no matter what you do.

The French have only negative things to say about everything and everyone.

Negotiating with Iran and believing they will keep their word is naive at best.