Skepticism Quotes - Page 17

• Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Nature, Science, Technology

  Universities Quarterly (1956) vol. 10, no. 3, p. 252

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• I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Brother, Team

  Obama's Remarks on Health Care and Surveillance, www.nytimes.com. June 7, 2013.

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• 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

  Running, People, Essentials

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• Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Errors, Suspense, Division

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.373, Stanford University Press

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• Emotions are far more contagious than any disease. A smile or a panic will spread through a group of people far faster than any virus ever could. When you walk into the office or a negotiation, then, wash your bad mood away before you see us. Don't cough on us, don't sneeze on us, sure, but don't bring your grouchiness, your skepticism or your fear in here either. It might spread.

  Seth Godin

  Motivational, Office, People

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• Know that, as in life, there is much that many have looked upon but few have seen because, as my father told me and his father told him, you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth.

  Odysseas Elytis

  Father, Depth, Study

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• 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

  Law, Kind, Knows

  Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands (2013). “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Desktop Edition Volume I”, Basic Books

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• The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome.

  Isaac Asimov

  Creativity, Creative, World

  "Isaac Asimov Asks, 'How Do People Get New Ideas?'". Essay by Isaac Asimov on creativity, www.technologyreview.com. 1959.

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• Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down

  Fred Hoyle

  Running, Editors, Trying

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• Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don't know where you're going. You're just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.

  Francis Crick

  Thinking, Fog, People

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• I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

  Tim Ferriss

  Real, People, Fields

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• As for Lindbergh, another eminent servant of science, all he proved by his gaudy flight across the Atlantic was that God takes care of those who have been so fortunate as to come into the world foolish. Expressing skepticism that adventure does not necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge.

  H. L. Mencken

  Adventure, World, Care

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• In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Truth, Discovery, Self

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• Commitment is what transforms a promise into a reality... Commitment is the stuff character is made of; the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Integrity, Character, Commitment

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• ...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Men, Feet, Needs

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1973). “The First Circle”

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• Is there any man that thinks in chains like the man who calls himself a free-thinker? Is there any man so credulous as the man who will not believe in the Bible? He swallows a ton of difficulties, and yet complains that we have swallowed an ounce of them. He has much more need of faith of a certain sort than we have, for skepticism has far harder problems than faith.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Believe, Men, Thinking

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• 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

  Faith, People, Support

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.

  Walter Lippmann

  Crosses, Born

  Walter Lippmann (1932). “The Stakes of Diplomacy”, p.51, Transaction Publishers

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• 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

  Believe, Reality, Understanding

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• We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead.

  Maira Kalman

  Paris, Mustache, Brain

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• But merely accepting authoritarian truth, even if that truth has some virtue, does not bring skepticism to an end. To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit. . . . Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit by tying fruits of truth onto its branches.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Our World, Years, Ideas

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• 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

  Phones, Pardon Me, Heavy

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• Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?

  Richard Paul Evans

  Children, Responsibility, Parenting

  Richard Paul Evans (2001). “The Christmas Box Miracle: My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope”, p.255, Simon and Schuster

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• Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule.

  Carl Sagan

  Country, Ignorance, Government

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.546, Ballantine Books

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• When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

  Bertrand Russell

  Party, Thinking, Political

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “Why I Am Not a Christian”, p.22, Lulu Press, Inc

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