Quotes About Skepticism

Much of what is reported on TV and other media outlets is actually pseudo or junk science, which is not real science, but is passed off as such.

Given the proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking that permeates the media, we are increasingly susceptible to thinking like a pseudoscientist-which contributes profoundly to errors in our beliefs and decisions.

Politicians tell you what you want to hear, what fools you all are for believing the lies and becoming such sheep.

The people can't find Syria on a map, they think God created humans one day in their existing form, and if you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.

We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves where the information originated, and how much distortion—deliberate or otherwise—is likely to have been introduced along the way.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

The improver of natural science absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

"Go to the d—l!" said the disappointed ghost-hunter. An hour—two—rolled on, and still no spectral visitation... and when the turret-clock sounded at length the hour of three, Ingoldsby, whose patience and grog were alike exhausted, sprang from his chair, saying— "This is all infernal nonsense, my good fellow. Deuce of any ghost shall we see to-night..."

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.

As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: "If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.

My point,' I said, 'is that there's hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.

We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of "uninformed," passed "misinformed" on the way down, and is now plummeting to "aggressively wrong." People don't just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.

The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. This

more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

His voice, the very sound of rolling eyes.

The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring reasons - the things that define what is a reason for us and what is not-are the starting points of our skepticism. 

There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you—there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.