Best 225 quotes in «skepticism quotes» category

That Muhammad could predict certain events does not prove that he was a prophet: he may have been able to guess successfully, but this does not mean that he had real knowledge of the future. And certainly the fact that he was able to recount events from the past does not prove that he was a prophet, because he could have read about those events in the Bible and, if he was illiterate, he could still have had the Bible read to him.

That's what drives science though: trying to find out the way things are, the way they were, and the way it really works. If that is your goal, then you want to make sure that your information is accurate, and if it's not, then it doesn't matter how much you liked that old urban legend or fictional factoid you once bought into. You will discard it, and be embarrassed by it, seeking instead for truth.

The aim is to love God because the pure heart loves loving God and because the true mind knows He deserves it. Unlike the accusations and beliefs of the critics and skeptics, it is neither an obligation of duty; nor a fear of damnation; nor a wish for power; nor a desire to appear more righteous than others; nor because God needs it; but because through all love, truth, reason, faith, honesty, and joy in and beyond oneself and the universe, He is worthy.

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.

[The Buddha said]: Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves.

The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.

The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

The goal of pyrrhonist skepticism according to Sextus Empiricus is ataraxia (peace of mind) through epoche, the suspension of dogmatic judgments. Dogmatic judgments concern things non-evident, most important any alleged truth about things beyond or behind their appearance.

The French Philosopher of the 16th and the 17th Century, Rene Descartes, had said: "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." This is the best way for the public to approach whatever it perceives. The only way to resist to deceit. Education and knowledge can help people be more skeptics, but everyone could start by doubting everything and not believing anything. Even the things that seem too obvious or too reliable. I've noticed a tendency to this direction, but I don't know how broad it is. It has to broaden; for humanity's sake. For truth's sake.

The holly grove, carved a century ago by the druids, was designed to amplify emotion to a cathartic crescendo. You see, druidism (as did most early religions) realized the essential truth that faith is an emotional, rather than a logical, response to the world. They designed their places of worship around this fact. Love, fear, guilt, rapture, these are religious words. Believers feel their belief. Skeptics contemplate their doubt.

The Legend of Robert Halsey This article examines the criminal conviction of Robert Halsey for sexually abusing two young boys on his school-van route near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Halsey's name has been invoked by academics, journalists, and activists as the victim of the “witch hunt” in this country over child sexual abuse. Based on a comprehensive examination of the trial transcript, this article details the overwhelming evidence of guilt against Mr. Halsey. The credulous acceptance of the “false conviction” legend about Robert Halsey provides a case study in the techniques and tactics used to minimize and deny sexual abuse, while promoting a narrative about “ritual abuse” and “witch hunts” that apparently requires little or no factual basis. The second part of this article analyzes how the erroneous “false conviction” narrative about Robert Halsey was constructed and how it gained widespread acceptance. The Legend of Robert Halsey provides a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wrap even the guiltiest person in a cloak of righteous “witch hunt” claims. Cases identified as “false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public. journal: Cheit, Ross E. "The Legend of Robert Halsey." Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.

The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they'll come back at 20,000 years ago maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I'll be out of here clean. This is going to be easy. But the date that came back was 50,000--ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon. Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and those dates also came back in the range of 50,000. So we've got it dated two ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we've found can't be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they're so different from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: 'Well... you've never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There's a first time for everything.

The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.

The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it.

[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false. How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.

The way to eliminate the harm caused by stereotypes is to teach our children to recognize false stereotypes, to be empathetic, and to be skeptical. We need to promote these critical-thinking skills in addition to instilling the best values we know. Skepticism, the heart of the scientific method, is the only way we know how to ferret out fact from fiction.

There is nothing worse than certainty. Doubt makes us weak. That is why it’s so important. I’ve wasted too much of my life trying to be powerful.

The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

The theologian Meric Casaubon argued—in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity—that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.

The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. "The Phantom Coach

Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores.

The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false; the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless.

This is what science always has to do, but religion will not do that. While scientists themselves may be religious individuals of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith—it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren't explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of everything. In fact, such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery.

Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

Those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

Those who question nothing are content with ignorance.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me. - Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp

To expose all the illusions of mankind without condemning a single one.

To demand the absolute and to be content with absolutely nothing else results in a skepticism.

To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.

Trust acquired through challenged skepticism is infinitely more solid and lasting than passive acceptance.

To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.

Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.

We're wired to see patterns like pictures in grilled cheese. On Mars, in stars, in cliffsides - Oh, the things we once believed!

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.

We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?

We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.

What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.