Plausible Quotes

#1. In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster.

Mark Twain

#2. The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.

Alan Watts

#3. I'm hoping I can evade a type and go for roles based on what I consider plausible and what I consider good.

Allison Tolman

#4. Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.

Bertrand Russell

#6. To isolate life from danger is a mission impossible! To take precautions against the dangers, that is the necessary and plausible mission!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#7. People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible

Will Rogers

#8. The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof, but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by GUESSING.

George Polya

#9. In some future America, there could be a plausible Michael Bloomberg path to the Democratic nomination. I would love to read a column by a smart person actually attempting to persuade me of this, using evidence.

Alex Pareene

#10. As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

John Podhoretz

#11. In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful.

Henry Spencer

#12. Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.

Rod Serling

#13. If it be not destiny, then surely there is plausible deniability, which in the parlance of politics is the same thing.

Christopher Moore

#14. To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation - is there a worst trade one makes in life?

Robert Breault

#15. No professional Wall Street tipster or plausible promoter can turn a sane person into a stock gambler as easily as his next-door neighbor bragging about his winnings. If all men profited by experience, the world would be peopled exclusively by the wise....

Kenneth L. Fisher

#16. Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind.

Robert Farrar Capon

#17. The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg

#18. How I preened at that, shamefully so in memory for, while I would have been put off by you calling me "hot" or a "babe" at my age, still having "it" - the illusive "it" factor that transcended looks or age was plausible.

From Prey. Middle-Aged Boys&Girls

Diane Bracuk

#19. Tim Kaine has been obviously a governor. He's been a senator. He's one of the smartest rising stars in the Democratic Party. He is very plausible as someone who could sit in and be president.

David Brooks

#20. The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.

James S.A. Corey

#21. If I would need to make a prediction I still believe Kaplan's scenario is very plausible.

David Korten

#22. I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Ben Marcus

#23. [M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.

Joseph De Maistre

#24. The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the nightmare of endless experience.

Edward St. Aubyn

#25. He begged hard, and said he couldn't play - a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could.

Mark Twain

#26. Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?

Tim Horvath

#27. It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable.

Edmund Burke

#28. Jim Stavridis is the former NATO commander who is sometimes on people's lists, also very plausible, self-possessed, someone with sobriety.

David Brooks

#29. A plausible rumor / Seems a lot more believable / Than the truth itself.

Kobo Abe

#30. It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

Richard Hofstadter

#31. All sacrifices of common sense, and all recourse to plausible political combinations, whether of individuals or of men, are uniformly made at the expense of the majority.

James Fenimore Cooper

#32. SHADOW KNIGHT'S MATE is a compelling story, extremely well-written and alarmingly plausible. Jay Brandon does for politics what Dan Brown did for religion.

Sharyn McCrumb

#33. The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.

Nancy Pearcey

#34. Is it not strange how humans will resort to the most inhumane of actions as the first plausible solution? Why are we such a feral bloodthirsty species when we are supposedly the enlightened ones? Are we guardians ... or just mindless butchers?

Dimitri Zaik

#35. The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.

William Hazlitt

#36. The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own "hunting shirts" to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.

Joseph J. Ellis

#37. As far as how important the real-life resonance of the stories is, I think it must play at least a small role in the show's success, because it gives the show this sense of suspense from the fact that it seems at least plausible.

Michael Loceff

#38. It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better.

Stanley Schmidt

#39. When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.

Alison Jackson

#40. To fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough.

Margaret Atwood

#41. The tendency toward an egocentric bias in satisficing is especially strong when a plausible answer is presented early on in the search process. We then tend to consider our task complete, even if it's far from being so.

Anonymous

#42. There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Andy Weir

#43. To quote an early mentor," I tell the kid, " 'A journalist needs ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability.

David Mitchell

#44. In Hollywood, imitation is the most profitable form of flattery. That is the only plausible explanation ...

Desson Thomson

#45. Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

Elliott Colla

#46. It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction and between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.

Eric Hoffer

#47. I just wanted to make sure that yes, that those horror - they worked as a genre. To me, I just wanted to be touched by the film in the way that I saw plausible. Which is the story about compassion - giving and receiving it in those desperate times of need.

Vera Farmiga

#48. Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.

Stefan Molyneux

#49. If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative.

Charles Edward Merriam

#50. There are many men like this; they can form a plausible theory and grasp its logical points, but take it away from them and destroy it utterly before their eyes, and they will not so easily lash their tired brains at once to build another theory in place of the one that is ruined.

Lord Dunsany

#51. No one talked about the questions, because talking ruined plausible deniability. Talking burst the bubble of innocence. Talking ended the happily ever after. These were the truths they believed. And they were lies. They should have talked while there was still something to say.

Courtney C. Stevens

#52. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo.

Cacilda Jetha

#53. We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.

Bill McKibben

#54. We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.

Wassily Leontief

#55. The claim that somehow raw foods give you better energy, are more healthful, improve your immune system and all of that is simply not substantiated. And moreover, it's not biologically plausible.

Dennis Miller

#56. There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.

Noam Chomsky

#57. If you look at the various strategies available for dealing with a new technology, sticking your head in the sand is not the most plausible strategy.

Ralph Merkle

#58. Cain - and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar

Laura Lippman

#59. The paperless society is about as
plausible as the paperless bathroom.

Jesse Shera

#60. The old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made so plausible.

Mahatma Gandhi

#61. The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

Norbert Wiener

#62. The likely economic effects [of the war in Iraq] would be relatively small ... Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.

Lawrence B. Lindsey

#63. That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.

J. Budziszewski

#64. What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?

Immanuel Wallerstein

#65. I suspect that a lot of the stress we see around us arises from the cognitive dissonance set up by one side of the brain hearing very plausible spin while the other side knows it just ain't so ...

David Palmer

#66. Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing.

Amy Clampitt

#67. I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

Steven Amsterdam

#68. Senior administrators within the CIA participated in plausible denial and other disinformation and cover-up strategies concerning CIA operations run on U.S. soil. Like

Colin A. Ross

#69. There is simply no plausible construction of the known evidence that leaves out Novak either providing a proffer through his lawyer of what he would say if he testified or having testified directly.

Michael Isikoff

#70. The plausible outcomes range from the gradual and benign to the more precipitous and damaging.

Timothy Geithner

#71. The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

Tom Wolfe

#72. The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

H.L. Mencken

#73. When I create a false reality, I always try to create a plausible structure to help convince people.

Joey Skaggs

#74. Faith prefers the absurd to the plausible.

Mason Cooley

#75. He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke

#76. Whereas if I want to create a prostitute character now from memories of different prostitutes and inventing stuff, I can say, "this could happen," "this is quite plausible." But I don't feel I know enough about border life to do the latter.

William T. Vollmann

#77. Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine ... and then make them plausible.

Chris Bohjalian

#78. (An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#79. It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.

H.G.Wells

#80. If we accept the premise that we're always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses ... and tell a good story.

James S.A. Corey

#81. You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

Walter Kirn

#82. There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

#83. The doctrine of transmigration... was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man; ... none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity.

Thomas Huxley

#84. The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#85. The true purpose of the various directives, regulations, and pocket-sized codes of conduct handed out to troops was not to implement genuine safeguards for noncombatants, but to give the military a paper trail of plausible deniability.

Nick Turse

#86. My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#87. Every object and event must have a plausible chain of causality that leads to it.

S.F. Chapman

#88. Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

Luigi Pirandello

#89. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

Julian Barnes

#90. Really good liars always work in something true to make the lie more plausible. - John Puller

David Baldacci

#91. The true and the plausible are rarely the same.

Helen McCloy

#92. Maybe this is what life is like - we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.

William Boyd

#93. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy.

Jorge Luis Borges

#94. Demands for equal financing of sewers, streets, and garbage collection would make more sense than proposals for equal financing of the schools, since some plausible connection may be inferred between the amount of money expended, e.g., for roads, and the quality of service resulting to the taxpayer.

M. Stanton Evans

#95. Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

David Mitchell

#96. Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions.

Wassily Leontief

#97. The hallmark of good science is the testing of a plausible hypothesis that is then either supported or rejected by the evidence.

Willie Soon

#98. The thing that made Communism seem so plausible to me was my own lack of logic which failed to distinguish between the reality of the evils which Communism was trying to overcome and the validity of its diagnosis and the chosen cure.

Thomas Merton

#99. I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it ... But I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don't see any plausible way of filling it.

Bart D. Ehrman

#100. Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.

John B. S. Haldane