Top 76 Quotes About Gullibility
#1. Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?
Umberto Eco
#2. Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.
David Wong
#3. The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
Thom Hartmann
#4. Francis Wheen takes a hugely enjoyable sweep through the tangled thickets of superstition and gullibility in which modern man likes to ramble. He takes particular delight in reminding us how easily fools are parted from their money and how many of them there are.
Ferdinand Mount
#5. The cure for advanced gullibility is to go to sleep and consider matters again the next day.
Isaac Asimov
#6. Because desperation breeds gullibility. People want to lose weight so much that their common sense shuts off.
David L. Katz
#7. Voting is proof that gullibility has been certified as a public virtue.
ABifarelli
#8. Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#9. Even before I had fully discovered the concepts of astrology, homeopathy, organised religion and probiotic yoghurts I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility.
Matt Haig
#10. The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.
Christopher Hitchens
#11. Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds?
Christopher Hitchens
#13. Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
Greil Marcus
#14. We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#15. When emotion supersedes reason ... gullibility must follow.
Barbara Mertz
#16. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not
Richard Dawkins
#17. Often what passes for faith in this world is little more than gullibility.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#18. Innocence can be redefined and called stupidity. Honesty can be called gullibility. Candor becomes lack of common sense. Interest in your work can be called cowardice. Generosity can be called soft-headedness, and observe : the former is disturbing
Abraham Maslow
#19. A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.
Eric Hoffer
#20. Walshes had been taking advantage of gullibility and stupidity ever since they conned their fellow cavemen out of their spears. Highwaymen, pirates, swindlers, and card sharks . . . their family history was both colorful and dark.
Kelley Armstrong
#21. Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#22. The real axis of evil in America is the genius of our marketing and the gullibility of our people.
Bill Maher
#23. Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
J.M. Coetzee
#24. You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
Lionel Shriver
#25. Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.
Jamie Whyte
#26. The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.
Tony Kushner
#27. Instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.
Paul Krugman
#28. Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he who gets the most out of life.
Helen Keller
#29. Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?
Keith Henson
#30. It makes you wonder if there is anything to astrology after all.' 'Oh, there is,' said Susan. 'Delusion, wishful thinking and gullibility.
Terry Pratchett
#31. You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you.
V.C. Andrews
#32. Martyrdom is often the result of excessive gullibility.
Barbara Mertz
#33. Denna lifted her glass in a salute. To the gullibility of the well-educated.
Patrick Rothfuss
#34. Never underestimate the gullibility of large pools of money.
David F. Swensen
#35. I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man.
Robin Hobb
#36. With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
Nadine Gordimer
#37. The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it's really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not.
Chris Van Allsburg
#38. In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer
#39. Rebels depend on willful gullibility.
Dan Jones
#40. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills.
Carl Sagan
#41. Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
Thomas Jefferson
#42. One makes his own meanings as the counterfeiter prints his own money: both know full well that the value of either rests solely in the gullibility of its recipient ...
Dan Garfat-Pratt
#43. The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away.
Walter Kirn
#44. The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination.
David Bergen
#45. One of the characteristics I cherish in my friends is their childlike gullibility, and several excited minutes were spent trying to actually find this book.
Phil Foglio
#46. Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich.
Stephen Bayley
#47. For every credibility gap there is a gullibility gap.
Richard Cobden
#48. There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two - a spiritual no-man's-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.
John Cheever
#49. I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. [An anarchist]
Joseph Conrad
#50. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.
George Carlin
#52. I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.
H.L. Mencken
#54. And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Khaled Hosseini
#55. I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.
Robert Penn Warren
#56. You can't believe everything people tell you - not even if those people are your own brain.
Jefferson Smith
#57. W: Nobody's so gullible as scientists. All the phony mediums say so. Can't quite see why.
J: Oh, yes, it would be so. They think they know, you see. That's always dangerous.
~Wharton; Jessop
Agatha Christie
#58. Sometimes the best way to learn a lesson isn't just hearing the words, but putting it into practice by experimenting with it and finding its truth for yourself instead of taking someone else's word for it.
A.J. Darkholme
#60. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
Aristotle.
#61. People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Charles Fort
#62. A coat of paint and a quote of words both make cosmetic differences.
Amit Abraham
#63. That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.
Adolf Von Harnack
#65. I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#68. It's because fear sells. It's because war is sport. And it's also very good business.
Hugh Howey
#70. Well, if she was dumb enough to marry you, she'll believe anything.
Oliver Hardy
#71. It was easy enough to invent theological-sounding passages, provided you used the right language. Most people presumed you were quoting something too obscure for them to recognise.
Alex Scarrow
#72. You'd be surprised what people will accept once you insist two or three times running that they have seen what you tell them they have seen.
Andrew Levkoff
#74. Teddy said it was a hat, So I put it on. Now dad is saying, where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?
Shel Silverstein
#75. The tendency to trust easily anyone gives way to a certain vulnerability.
Angelica Hopes
#76. Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.
E.B. White
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