Best 225 quotes in «skepticism quotes» category

Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it’s not that baffling.

A person who peremptorily denies the existence of anything which is beyond the horizon of his understanding because he cannot make it harmonise with his accepted opinions is as credulous as he who believes everything without any discrimination. Either of these persons is not a freethinker, but a slave to the opinions which he has accepted from others, or which he may have formed in the course of his education, and by his special experiences in his (naturally limited) intercourse with the world. If such persons meet with any extraordinary fact that is beyond their own experience, they often either regard it with awe and wonder, and are ready to accept any wild and improbable theory that may be offered to them in regard to such facts, or they sometimes reject the testimony of credible witnesses, and frequently even that of their own senses. They often do not hesitate to impute the basest motives and the most silly puerilities to honourable persons, and are credulous enough to believe that serious and wise people had taken the trouble to play upon them “practical jokes,” and they are often willing to admit the most absurd theories rather than to use their own common sense.

[A] planet, wholly inhabited by spiders, (which is very possible)

A religion deeply rooted in theology, is never above skepticism hinged upon the twin pillars; of reason & facts.

As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.

A story is a wondrous invention.

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted.

Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.

Believe what you wish, but prove what you can.

Both [P. T.] Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.

But I can’t believe. The older I get, the more solid the wall becomes, like everything that was to be explored has already been. True things grow truer, and unproved things fade away. Because we don’t need them. Like I don’t need a god.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Before accepting your guess just based on how you feel, let's admit we just don't know, and discover if it's real.

College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth. Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low. Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net. As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, "The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.

D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action.

David Hume, in a moment of acute skepticism, felt panicky in the solitude of his study and had to go out and join his friends in the billiard room in order to be reassured that the external world was really there.

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

Diagnosing dissociation does not make it happen, and denying it does not make it go away.

But promoting philosophical skepticism is not quite the mission of this book. If awareness of the Black Swan problem can lead us into withdrawal and extreme skepticism, I take here the exact opposite direction. I am interested in deeds and true empiricism. So, this book was not written by a Sufi mystic, or even by a skeptic in the ancient or medieval sense, or even (we will see) in a philosophical sense, but by a practitioner whose principal aim is not to be a sucker in things that matter, period.

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

Everyone who doubts knows that he is doubting, so that he is certain of this truth at least, namely the fact that he doubts. Thus every one who doubts whether there is such a thing as truth, knows at least one truth, so that his very capacity to doubt should convince him that there is such a thing as truth.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

For somewhere in the back of my mind is that odd explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many - a short sentence such as "John slept close to a woman with whom he worked" - as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual. Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths.

For the New Age community, 'ancient' knowledge is always considered unimpeachable and unimprovable, just as a diverse range of beliefs from Eastern mysticism to UFOs, energy dowsing to cryptozoology, are - though mutually contradictory - unquestionably accepted in the name of open-mindedness.

God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.

God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.

He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.

Good general differ from bad generals only in the degree to which they resist the psychopathology of the very organization they serve. Norman Dixon

Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.

He was the least spiritual of all the monks here, accepting nothing without proof. This skepticism was simultaneously his greatest asset and his greatest impediment.

How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.

How can we consider ourselves to be rational and proclaim that God is ineffable—beyond our frail human abilities to comprehend him—and in the same stroke of the pen develop a list of orthodoxical beliefs of what God is and is not!?

However, it is important to remember that only 15 years ago most mayor training schools did not accept the existence of child abuse and condemned what they saw as the unhealthy excitement that was considered to emanate from the earliest exponents. The language of their criticism is very similar... to what greets the clinician of today who speaks of DID. It has been a later knowledge that understands the way the shame and trauma of abuse become projected into the professional network leading to splitting and blame.

I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is, I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though....

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

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough. And I believe the same is true of inner travel. You don't have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find about them for yourself if you want to. Don't take my word for it. Be as skeptical as you like. Find out for yourself.

If Christians always seemed to be the most intelligent and the most righteous of men, I'd be a skeptic.

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct -- if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

If life is music, I sometimes feel as though I was born on the off-beat of the song, and I love it. As Christian numbers reportedly decrease in America, my love for Christ feels as though it increases. Perhaps that is a little strange, yes, but in all honesty, I now want to be thought unfaithful about as much as a smug aristocrat wants to be thought a hobo.

If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. [Letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820]

If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.