Doubt Quotes - Page 30

• When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Flower, Men, Garden

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

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• The source of Pyrrhonism comes from failing to distinguish between a demonstration, a proof and a probability. A demonstration supposes that the contradictory idea is impossible; a proof of fact is where all the reasons lead to belief, without there being any pretext for doubt; a probability is where the reasons for belief are stronger than those for doubting.

  Andrew Michael Ramsay

  Ideas, Stronger, Facts

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• You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.

  Frank Gehry

  Believe, Optimistic, Lines

  "New Again: Frank Gehry". Interview with Angela Ledgerwood and Ross Miller, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 19, 2012.

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• You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean.

  Nick Lowe

  Mean, Thinking, Talking

  Source: www.gq.com

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• To those of you with your years of service still ahead, the challenge is yours. Stop doubting yourselves. Have the courage to make up your minds and hold your decisions. Refuse to be BOUGHT for a nickel, or a million dollars, or a job!

  Mary McLeod Bethune

  Jobs, Years, Decision

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• We don't always know the details of our future. We do not know what lies ahead. We live in a time of uncertainty. We are surrounded by challenges on all sides. Occasionally discouragement may sneak in to our day; frustration may invite itself into our thinking; doubt might enter about the value of our work. In these dark moments Satan whispers in our ears that we will never be able to succeed, that the price isn't work the effort, and that our small part will never make a difference. He, the father of all lies, will try to prevent us from seeing the end from the beginning.

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Lying, Father, Dark

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• Emerging church leaders are not impressed by those who defend the Christian faith by promoting definitive answers to convince those who doubt the faith.

  Eddie Gibbs

  Christian, Leader, Church

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• I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong

  Desmond Tutu

  Commitment, Law, Looks

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• A famous anecdote concerning Cuvier involves the tale of his visitation from the devil—only it was not the devil but one of his students dressed up with horns on his head and shoes shaped like cloven hooves. This frightening apparition burst into Cuvier's bedroom when he was fast asleep and claimed:
  'Wake up thou man of catastrophes. I am the Devil. I have come to devour you!'
  Cuvier studied the apparition carefully and critically said,
  'I doubt whether you can. You have horns and hooves. You eat only plants.

  Georges Cuvier

  Men, Shoes, Devil

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• The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.

  Morris Raphael Cohen

  Done, Succeed, Philosopher

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• It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Believe, Opinion, True Ones

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• A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the republic.

  H. L. Mencken

  Change, Loyalty, Time

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.316, Vintage

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• Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.

  H. L. Mencken

  Character, Men, Contemporary Fiction

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

  H. L. Mencken

  Death, Shade, Lasts

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• No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.

  H. L. Mencken

  Trust, Believe, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.10, Vintage

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• Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

  E. B. White

  Photography, Art, Writing

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• I do not doubt but the majest and beauty of the world are latent
  in any iota of the world;
  I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects,
  vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse than
  I have supposed.

  Walt Whitman

  Weed, World, Slave

  Walt Whitman (1861). “Leaves of Grass”, p.217

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• When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Ignorance, Order, Ignorant

  "The Value of Science". Richard P. Feynman's public address at the National Academy of Sciences, Autumn 1955.

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• I presume that few who have paid any attention to the history of the Mathematical Analysis, will doubt that it has been developed in a certain order, or that that order has been, to a great extent, necessary -- being determined, either by steps of logical deduction, or by the successive introduction of new ideas and conceptions, when the time for their evolution had arrived.

  George Boole

  Order, Ideas, Analysis

  George Boole (1872). “A Treatise on Differential Equations”, p.5

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• The vast majority of the peoples of the world are against war and against aggression. If they make their wishes known and effective, war can be stopped. It all depends on whether they are willing to make the effort necessary for the purpose. For, that it will require an effort, no one who considers the history of the world on these subjects can doubt.

  Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury

  War, Effort, Wish

  "The Future of Civilization". Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. June 1, 1938.

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• I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Strong, Military, Order

  "The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay" edited by Thomas Pinney, Vol. 6, p. 94, 1981.

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• It was before Deity embodied in a human form walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the pride of the portico, and the fasces of the lictor, and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Pride, Men, Dust

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• If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Sunday, Should Have, People

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• Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Opportunity, Law, Justice

  "Frank v. Magnum, 237 U.S. 309, 347". Judicial opinion, 1915.

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• The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed from the inorganic to the organic from blind force to conscious intellect and will.

  Thomas Huxley

  Crush, Men, Views

  "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature". Book by Thomas Henry Huxley. Chapter 1, p. 28, 1884.

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