Top 100 Quotes About Skepticism
#2. I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it.
Stephen Colbert
#3. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#4. Skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#5. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#6. Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.
Richard P. Feynman
#7. Uncertain of uncertainty, skeptical of skepticism, it seems that the most important question is whether there is an important question.
Mitchell Heisman
#8. Healthy skepticism is often the best way to glean the value of what's being presented - challenge it; prove it wrong, if you can. That creates engagement, which is the key to understanding.
David Allen
#9. It's not only the British voters who have doubts about European cooperation. There is skepticism in many other E.U. countries.
Mark Rutte
#10. If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#11. The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.
Steven Weinberg
#12. 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.
Mark Crutchfield
#13. Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.
A.O. Scott
#14. Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#15. In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.
John Henrik Clarke
#16. If the rule of thumb for attention literacy is to pay attention to your intention, then the heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default.
Howard Rheingold
#17. It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.
Earl Weaver
#19. People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Carl Sagan
#21. One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.
William Osler
#22. Centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepticism, and artistic aberrations.
Will Durant
#23. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
C.S. Lewis
#24. Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.
Abraham Lincoln
#25. Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
#26. To me, people's lives and loves are entwined with their characters, natures and circumstances. I regard all general advice with skepticism.
Rafael Yglesias
#28. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#29. Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.
Thomas Clifford Allbutt
#30. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
Immanuel Kant
#31. You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
Carl Sagan
#32. Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
#34. If Christians always seemed to be the most intelligent and the most righteous of men, I'd be a skeptic.
Criss Jami
#35. We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.
Carl Sagan
#37. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
Blaise Pascal
#38. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.
Peter Watts
#39. I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
Michael Shermer
#40. 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.
Peter Medawar
#41. The arts save us from a dreary skepticism.
Marty Rubin
#42. Scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill
George Eliot
#43. have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#44. How could any Lord have made this world? ... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit ... No happiness lasted.
Virginia Woolf
#45. We need sentiment and skepticism. Sentiment to be happy; skepticism to be free.
Marty Rubin
#46. Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism ... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.
Wendy Kaminer
#47. The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.
Margaret Halsey
#48. 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.
Carl Sagan
#49. People's feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly,
Carl Sagan
#50. In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers; they have canonized the most gigantic liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#51. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
Carl Sagan
#52. When I was a boy, I read with great interest but skepticism about as magic lamp which was used with success by a certain Aladdin. Today I have no skepticism whatsoever about the magic of the xenon flash lamp which we use so effectively for many purposes. (1970)
Harold Eugene Edgerton
#53. It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between.
Paul Davies
#54. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Sam Harris
#55. Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.
David Icke
#56. A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
Louis Menand
#57. A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.
William E. Gladstone
#58. 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
#59. The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.
Thomas Jefferson
#60. [A] planet, wholly inhabited by spiders, (which is very possible)
David Hume
#61. The implication was that if you had any skepticism whatsoever, you were anti-science. I think there's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry.
Marianne Williamson
#62. The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge.
Carl Sagan
#63. You know, the very strength of science is that it keeps us from the errors of mythos, from getting committed to a set of memes that we adopt because of congruence with what we think we know. Science demands skepticism.
Tim Ward
#64. The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.
Charles Darwin
#65. Always doubtful is the one who always looks for certainty.
Raheel Farooq
#66. Skepticism literally means a thoughtful inquiry, the looking at a problem in a disinterested spirit, the surveying of a question from many sides. In this sense it is the very essence of philosophy and science.
Joseph Alexander Leighton
#67. The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man's higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.
E.F. Schumacher
#68. There is no way back. No other explanations have been offered, in two thousand years of sneering skepticism toward the Christian witness, that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb came to be empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and worldviews were transformed.
N. T. Wright
#69. I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.
Christiaan Huygens
#70. After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it.
Chris Womersley
#71. You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off.
Rex Stout
#72. It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something.
Steven Pinker
#73. Pardon me, but there's someone on the phone who says they have a call for you."
There's a call to tell me I have a call?" he asked with heavy skepticism.
Jeaniene Frost
#74. Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Jules Verne
#75. It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish.
Derek Landy
#76. Skepticism, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in.
Gerry Spence
#77. Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
Frederick Buechner
#78. Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.
David Suzuki
#80. It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.
William Finnegan
#81. She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
Robert K. Massie
#82. We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.
Andy Rooney
#84. In times of war, skepticism can be just cause for execution.
A.J. Darkholme
#85. What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
Pierre Laplace
#86. Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader process of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.
Chris Mooney
#87. You cannot knock a man down who will not stand up, nor argue with a skeptic.
Austin O'Malley
#89. 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.
Carl Sagan
#91. Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.
Paul Kurtz
#92. In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
Vincent Van Gogh
#93. There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.
Flannery O'Connor
#94. Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey
#95. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.
Ann Druyan
#96. You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.
Chinua Achebe
#97. Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics ... Strength, FREEDOM which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. [The Bible] has survived attack of every kind. Neither barbaric vandalism nor civilized scholarship has touched it. Neither the burning of fire nor the laughter of skepticism has accomplished its annihilation. Through the many dark ages of man, its glorious promises have survived unchanged.
Billy Graham
#100. If your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary
Tim Krieder
