Quotes About Skepticism

Bah, cynics, said Dr. Meescham. Cynics are people who are afraid to believe.

Do not hope; instead, observe" were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

Flora hated the phrase "correct me if I'm wrong." In her experience, people only said it when they knew they were right.

What you giving me them shifty-eyed looks for?

His brow furrowed in a way that suggested he was calculating my likely ability to be that naive.

Proceed cautiously with people who can no longer be bowled over by wonder.

To withhold trust until there is no doubt is not trust.

I have just rid the road of the three big bad bullies!" Theseus proclaimed. "Oh, bull!" shouted a shopper. "Yeah!" shouted another. "You and what army?" "I did it alone!" Theseus called. "With my bare hands!" Good boy! I thought.

People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...

He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

I couldn't really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?

I didn't believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

Hope is never a foolish thing—although others will tell you it is.

It's the ones who don't tell you they are informing," he said, "that you have to worry about.

Tyler usually trusted Kane Pendleton about as far as she could throw a bull elephant, but she didn't hesitate to give him her hand and follow his orders. If she had learned nothing else of him during their past encounters, she had learned to trust him in times of danger. He might well pull every trick he could think of in order to beat her to whatever they both sought, but he would no more abandon a bitter enemy in trouble than he would his best friend. She fell somewhere between.

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.

But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.

An understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires.

What do you think she'd have said if we'd asked her? 'Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?' She'd have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from.

Maybe my expectations for honesty are too high.

Do you really think he untied you? .. He was just checking his kids handiwork.

If he knew one thing about life, it was this: look out for yourself. No one else would do it for you. If you were cheated or tricked, it was your own fault, and a lesson best learned before the world devoured you.