Top 96 Quotes About Scepticism
#1. No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity.
David Hume
#2. For a good many years now I have practised at the bar; and, if that fact offers no guarantee of unimpeachable veracity it at least furnishes presumptive evidence of a fairly robust moral epidermis. I may not be believed; but the frankest scepticism will leave me undisturbed and unabashed.
R. Austin Freeman
#3. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism.
- Shaw's Preface
George Bernard Shaw
#5. The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of scepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life.
David Hume
#6. Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Freeman Dyson
#7. Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Victor Hugo
#8. Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism.
Salman Rushdie
#9. The more she rejected us the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly, her disdain for authority, her scepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her ... She is Molly.
Phillip Noyce
#10. Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.
James Russell Lowell
#11. No conclusion can be more agreable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limites of human reason and capacity
David Hume
#12. What else would they be?"
"No idea." Arik shrugged ... "Aliens, mabye?"
"Aliens." Thanatos's voice was flat, disbelieving.
"Your scepticism is funny, coming from one of the Four fucking Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Larissa Ione
#13. Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.
Fulton J. Sheen
#14. How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal?
Yanis Varoufakis
#15. Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth.
Jeremy Paxman
#16. Scepticism, ironically, draws its life's blood from claims to have a good deal of knowledge. For example, your friends claim to know, 'Since every possible option has not been explored, nothing can be said for certain.' That statement is itself a claim to knowledge!
William Lane Craig
#17. ...the scepticism of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have actually had personal experience of them.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#19. In government, you are pressed by the security agencies. They come to you with very good information, and they say, 'You need to do something.' So you do need the breath of scepticism, not cynicism, breathing on them.
David Blunkett
#20. Don't confuse scepticism as an attitude, or a method, with scepticism as a philosophy. Socrates was sceptical in temperament, and his method was to question everything. But he believed in absolute truth; he was no sceptic.
Peter Kreeft
#21. Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.
James Anthony Froude
#22. Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate.
Carl Sagan
#23. I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
Tom Stoppard
#24. 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?
Richard Dawkins
#25. On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them
Nick Hornby
#26. Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough.
C.S. Lewis
#28. A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.
Thomas Jefferson
#29. A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.
Denis Diderot
#30. In all the events of life, we ought still to preserve our scepticism. If we believe that fire warms, or water refreshes, it is only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise.
David Hume
#31. Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the Throne.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#32. I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with necessary scepticism.
Alain De Botton
#33. There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.
David Hume
#34. Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.
G.K. Chesterton
#35. There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
William James
#36. And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#37. Oxford also taught me something else - it taught me scepticism.
Frank Scott
#38. The three main sources of scepticism are first, that not every people desires freedom; second, that democracy in certain parts of the world would be dangerous; and third, that there is little the world's democracies can do to advance freedom outside their countries.
Natan Sharansky
#39. It is true that 'I seem to see a table' does not entail 'I see a table'; but 'I seem to feel a pain' does entail 'I feel a pain'. So scepticism loses its force - cannot open up its characteristic gap - with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain.
Galen Strawson
#40. The shadow of scepticism is dispelled in the light of real knowledge.
Etienne De L'Amour
#41. The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.
Pierre Duhem
#42. Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#43. Historians need to treat a participant's own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.
Julian Barnes
#44. As long as scepticism is based on a sound understanding of science it is invaluable, for that is how science progresses. But poor criticism can lead those who are unfamiliar with the science involved into doubting everything about climate change predictions.
Tim Flannery
#45. Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
#46. What of Art?
-It is a malady.
Love?
-An Illusion.
Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What are you?
-To define is to limit.
Oscar Wilde
#47. The want of faith, as well as faith itself, is best shewn by works. If a sceptic avoid the fire as much as those who believe it dangerous to go into it, we can hardly avoid thinking his scepticism to be feigned, and not real.
Thomas Reid
#48. This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible.
Natan Sharansky
#49. Scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill
George Eliot
#50. It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.
Nanamoli Thera
#51. There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.
Rupert Sheldrake
#52. scepticism by means of classical arguments, the most effective means initially to promote arousal. And,
Peter Unger
#53. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#54. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
Carl Sagan
#55. The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.
Andrea Levy
#56. The average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#57. She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#58. The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of scepticism with faith.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#59. Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
#60. General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
#61. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
G.K. Chesterton
#63. We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism.
Blaise Pascal
#64. Scepticism and refusal of authority is at the heart of scientific endeavour. Scientific knowledge dictates economic possibilities
David Landes
#65. A major problem for Black women, and all people of color, when we are challenged to oppose anti-Semitism, is our profound scepticism that white people can actually be oppressed.
Barbara Smith
#66. Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.
Mason Cooley
#67. I find that the critics of voluntary service are all too often those who are prepared to accept such services when they require them but deride them with cynicism and scepticism when they see others helping and being helped.
Eva Hart
#68. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too - it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.
Julian Barnes
#69. I'm always coming up against scepticism in my life.
Geri Halliwell
#70. There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
Junot Diaz
#71. Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
Blaise Pascal
#72. The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.
James Martineau
#74. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted.
H.P. Lovecraft
#75. The idea that water has a memory can be refuted by any one of several easily understood, invalid, arguments.
Brian Josephson
#76. No ghosts need apply.
- Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
Arthur Conan Doyle
#77. There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
Richard Lederer
#78. To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Christopher Hitchens
#79. The greatest tragedy with a sceptic is that he cannot consign himself to truth, however he may see it.
Raheel Farooq
#80. Most people are too silly to be truly interested in any thing. They herd together like cattle, and do not know what is good for them.
Frank R. Stockton
#81. Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.
Douglas Adams
#82. You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.
Tim Minchin
#83. I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts
#84. For better or worse we're in an age of disbelief," Rico said, "An age of science and a need for proof.
Bryan Islip
#85. The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
Carl Sagan
#86. Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.
Max Brooks
#87. I don't believe that celebrity spokeswomen get their hair colour from a box.
Roberta Pearce
#89. It seems to me that they only seem to mention things in the Bible that are within a 5 mile radius of the guy writing it.
Jim Jefferies
#90. What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
Christopher Hitchens
#91. Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume
#92. Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.
Franz Kafka
#93. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
T. S. Eliot
#94. How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'?
Jake Jesser
#95. A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
Ricky Gervais
#96. Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Levi-Strauss
