Quotes About Skepticism

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything that didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one.

I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones—by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether a universe or a smaller one.

The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their own children—has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

She hesitated slightly. "I've seen what was called telekinesis with dice—but I'm no mathematician and I could not testify that what I saw was telekinesis." "Hell's bells, you wouldn't testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy.

I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent – it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their children—has never been plumbed.

He could not afford to believe anything that he was told, or that he read, or that was implicitly assumed to be true about the world around him. No, he could not believe any of it, for the sum total of what be had been told and read and been taught in school was so contradictory, so senseless, so wildly insane that none of it could be believed unless he personally confirmed it.

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; most people were candidates for protective restraint. He simply wished they would leave him alone!—all

Boss, there ain't no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy.

I wonder how harmless, such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers?

Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional . . . for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

I ask only one thing of skeptics: don't bring up Soviet Russia, please. That horrible example of State Capitalism has nothing to do with what I, and other libertarian socialists, would offer as an alternative to the present system.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) - Robert Anton Wilson

We have already explained that, of course — even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Besides, it was only coincidence. (Remember that phrase. It is the self-hypnotic chant by which the New Inquisition banishes all evidence it does not like. We will hear it often.)

The real fun of conspiracy hunting comes when you realize you can't trust anyone, as all the paranoids know.

Prof. Marcello Truzzi, sociologist, from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called the Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn't skeptical at all in the true meaning of that word but is an advocacy body upholding orthodox establishment views. In other words, their alleged skepticism has become, as my paradox suggests, just another dogmatic blind faith.

Somehow, in passing from abnormal temperatures to blue luminescence and haloes, we seem to have crossed a line, and, for most readers, skepticism is increasing. I wonder why that is? Is it possible that what I call the New Idol so dominates the modern world that even those who read a subversive book like this are still uneasy about becoming too blasphemous, too heretical?

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Well, then I started to find out that it wasn't all paranoid. The Illuminati really was a very influential organization in its time. I am extremely skeptical that it still exists. But it did play a much larger role in the 18th century than most conventional historians realize. The more you look at it, the more intriguing connections leap out at you.