Quotes About Skepticism

The courage not to believe in anything.

A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

The New Testament without the miracles would be far easier to believe. But the trouble is, it would not be worth believing

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

Honestly, Im having trouble with the fact that youre having difficulty believing us. You are the only one in the room levitating.

In our existing political conditions, when everybody agrees about something, it is generally untrue.

Research has shown that frequent viewers of Fox News, a network that writes skepticism about climate change into its scripts, are less likely to accept the scientific consensus than those who do not watch Fox News.

1) Always question authority; (2) when in doubt, see rule 1.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.

In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky?

Heretics are the only ones worth trusting,' the voice said, 'for they have everything to gain and everything to lose.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Jesus supposedly lived sometime between 4 B.C.E. and 30 C.E., but there is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, not during his entire lifetime.

whether you're talking about boners, infidelities, late rent, or the Democratic primary: a single plausible excuse will sound like a credible explanation while a basket full of excuses—even a basket stuffed with equally legitimate, plausible/probable excuses—will sound like a desperate/unbelievable lie.

Who cares, anymore? Nobody believes anything politicians say. It's not like they're working for us, all they do after they get into office is run for reelection. Money, money, money, that's all it's about.

They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool.

don't think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.

Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote." TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote

Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted ("ick," "yuck," "ugh"), in part because we believe that its practice revolves around duplicity, dissembling, and double-dealing.