Quotes About Skepticism

We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in them.

Politics makes me sick.

We all exist in a state of doubt even when we do not realize it.

Act as if every broker, insurance salesman, mutual fund salesperson, and financial advisor you encounter is a hardened criminal, and stick to low-cost index funds, and you'll do just fine.

So when all your friends are investing in a certain area, when the business pages are full of stories about a particular company, and when "everybody knows" that something is a good deal, haul up the red flags. In short, identify current conventional wisdom so that you can ignore it.

The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

if you're a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you've basically got two choices: Either you go home or else you get yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus' corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples.

If America's slide into secularism continues, then what awaits us tomorrow is already evident today in Europe. Western Europe has become so secularized that it's hard for the gospel even to get a fair hearing. As a result, missionaries must labor for years to win even a handful of converts. Having lived for thirteen years in Europe in four different countries, I can testify personally to how hard it is for people to respond to the message of Christ.

I looked at the jury, raised an eyebrow. I work on that in the mirror at home, the one raised eyebrow. It should be a course of its own in law school. You sort of have to relax one half of your face, contract the muscles on the other, all while keeping a sweetly sardonic expression. You do it wrong, you look like you just ate bad jalapeño. You do it right, it denotes skepticism, it denotes shared knowledge, it was as good as shouting to the jury.

Where nobody trusts anyone else, it's impossible to work together.

Bush Sr. was a jerk, Quayle an idiot, Clinton was atrocious and disgusting, most of those who persecuted him were hypocritical, Gore is shallow and weak, Bradley is an idealist, Bush Jr. a fool, and all of the independent candidates act like they're on drugs.

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.

Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to 'pollute' the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. 'I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it's overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it's called Datenmüll: data rubbish.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it.

on learning how to reject their authority. This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba', which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.

Richard Feynman said, 'Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba', which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.

Don't believe everything you read.

Es tan tentador no creerse las versiones oficiales…

Hay que desconfiar de los tipos que te meten la nariz en la boca.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.