Quotes About Skepticism

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.

You know, I would buy you a parachute if I thought it wouldn't open.

Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

You simplify because you cannot believe. You reduce; you diminish. Because you were raised to doubt and debunk. To reduce to a small set of knowns for easy digestion. Because you are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America—where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.

Vakten ga tydelig inntrykk av at han trodde damemennesket hadde hallusinasjoner eller også hadde forlest seg på Agatha Christie, men man visste jo aldri.

I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Poltergeist activity is so inherently improbable that most rational people simply cannot believe it. And when they see it and have to believe it, they find it very hard to convince anybody else that it really happens.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Golborne is up to this point in his career a Stanford and Northwestern alumnus with a stellar corporate résumé, but he's never been someone who's had to think of himself as a man of the people. He's never had to make the concerns of the poor his own, and he's never known what it's like to be the public servant of people who want him to be strong and who are deeply suspicious of him at the same time.

Advertising is legalized lying.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

No one in this world, so far as I know… has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

unscientific theories, e.g. big dogs were kept by people who lived in little houses and vice versa. Clients who said "spare no expense" never paid their bills, ever. When I asked my way in the Dales and was told "you can't miss it," I knew I'd soon be hopelessly lost.) I had begun to wonder if perhaps country folk, despite their closer contact with fundamental things, were perhaps more susceptible than city people.

I go on the presumption that everyone's full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually gives me a good advantage.

But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day..

The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered. —O, Haines said, you have heard it before? —Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily. —You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked . I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. —There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said. 21

He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.