Skepticism Quotes - Page 17

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

  Walter Lippmann

  Thinking, Self, Ideas

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Religious, Class, Luxury

  Kurt Vonnegut (2011). “Timequake”, p.74, Random House

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• What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and
  heaven?

  William Shakespeare

  Heaven, Humanity, Hamlet And Ophelia

  William Shakespeare (1823). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare: From the Text of Johnson, Stevens, and Reed; with Glossarial Notes, His Life, and a Critique on His Genius & Writings”, p.920

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• 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

  Xenon, Boys, Magic

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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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• I used everything as a positive
  to make me a better person and
  a better player. I have no regrets.
  Everytime I had to play a big game,
  I played a big game. I used some of
  the skepticism as a positive and motivation.

  Chris Osgood

  Motivation, Regret, Player

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• Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Mean, Innovation, Doubt

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• Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

  Blaise Pascal

  Humility, Pride, Math

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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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• 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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• 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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• The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Strong, Opposites

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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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• ...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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• Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology. Snappy dresser, though.

  Kathy Reichs

  Cop, Anthropology, Sensitivity

  Kathy Reichs (2014). “Monday Mourning: A Novel”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Father, Views, Republic

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• Speaking as someone who bought the party line for far too long, you would be amazed what you can believe if you keep convincing yourself the press, the libs, the universities - hell, everyone but a few on the religious fringe and big business - are out to get you. I was lucky - I started to snap out of this a couple of years ago and hopefully will now apply to both major parties the same skepticism and cynicism I had in the past reserved for Democrats.

  John Cole

  Religious, Couple, Party

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• The trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Luxury, Doubt, Tribes

  "Kurt Vonnegut Judges Modern Society". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 23, 2006.

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