Quotes & Sayings About Credulity

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch. — Bette Davis

Doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct — Kathryn Schulz

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain. — Christopher Hitchens

There was something about Gawain's youth and credulity that was driving me to puncture his pious innocence. — Bernard Cornwell

I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earthwas flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism. — George Bernard Shaw

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. However — Sam Harris

Those old credulities, to Nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of history? — William Wordsworth

Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages. — Samuel Johnson

These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything ... It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility. — Robertson Davies

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things. — Walt Whitman

And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart's content.
"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see. — Charles Dickens

Despoilers obey the Malthusian law; they multiply with the means of existence, and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes. — Frederic Bastiat

This touches on the issue of how vegans should handle the caveman argument. Many of us are tempted to strain credulity and torture the evidence to 'prove' humans are 'naturally' vegan. This is a trap, and one into which carnists (especially paleo-dieters) would love us to fall; the evidence isn't on our side. There's no doubt that hominids ate meat.... The argument for veganism has always been primarily ethical, and ought to remain that way. It's based on a concern for the future, not an obsession about the past. — Jack Norris

The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy. — George Bernard Shaw

Love is an affair of credulity. — Ovid

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. — Samuel Johnson

Ignorance of naturall causes disposeth a man to Credulity, so as to believe many times impossibilities: for such know nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true; being unable to detect the Impossibility. And Credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company, disposeth them to lying: so that Ignorance it selfe without Malice, is able to make a man bothe to believe lyes, and tell them; and sometimes also to invent them. — Thomas Hobbes

I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you,' he said.
'Because we're the people that believe people that other people don't believe,' I said.
'How can I know that?' he asked.
'You're just going to have to believe me,' I said. — Ben Aaronovitch

We must remember how apt man is to extremes
rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

From the 18th to the 20th Century it was the boast that human thought had at least come out of the dark woods of medieval superstition, credulity and obscurantism, into the sunshine of clear thinking where the dry breezes of skepticism blow unhindered. 'Fell the trees and level the hills that still obscure the view; let the winds drive off the mist' - they said. But now that much of this work has been accomplished it is beginning to be felt that there is no shade in all these flat plains of perpetual parching wind and sunshine, and through this desert no flooding Nile flows. There are those who, secretly, would like, if they could, to reconstruct the dim, wet, haunted woods before they die of thirst. — Nanamoli Thera

As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm.
'You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man.' She narrowed her eyes and shivered. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. — Eric Hoffer

The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct. — Muhammad Asad

The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history. — Daniel J. Boorstin

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests. — Baron D. Holbach

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. — Edward Gibbon

The magician depends for the success of his art upon the credulity of the people. Whatever mystifies, excites curiosity; whatever in turn baffles this curiosity, works the marvelous. — Alexander Herrmann

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. — H.L. Mencken

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this
tendency. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Everywhere I turn I see it - credulity being exploited, and men of practical judgment, watching the game and seeing through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism. How — Upton Sinclair

We believe easily what we fear of what we desire — Jean De La Fontaine

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale") — John Berwick Harwood

Look at it another way. A stack of five hundred sheets of paper is two to three inches high. How high would the stack be if it had 6 x 1023 sheets? That stack would reach from the earth to the sun, not once, but more than one million times.2 Yet, in about two gulps of water, God has packed that many molecules. The miracle of walking on water is small for Him who created it in the first place. The multiplication of bread was but a simple command for Him when the very earth was brought forth at His command. (C. S. Lewis commented that a slow miracle is no easier to perform than an instant one.) The skeptic, of course, will challenge such credulity that accepts wholesale such stories, not realizing that what they swallow in a glass of water is a miracle in and of itself! The — Ravi Zacharias

Credulity is the sister of innocence ... — Fanny Burney

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity. — Tacitus

That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story. — Thomas Paine

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. — Terence McKenna

The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey. — H.L. Mencken

Both the fanatical believers and the fixed attitude people are loud in their scorn of what they call "woolly minds." ... [But it] is the woolly mind that combines scepticism about everything with credulity about everything. Being woolly it has no hard edges. It is easy, pliant, yet it has its own toughness. Because it bends, it does not break. ... The woolly mind realizes that we live in an unimaginable gigantic, complicated, mysterious universe. To try to stuff the vast bewildering creation into a few neat pigeon-holes is absurd. We don't know enough, and to pretend we do is mere intellectual conceit. ... The best we can do is keep looking out for clues, for anything that will light us a step or two in the dark. — J.B. Priestley

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless. — Sam Kean

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d'articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd'huy?
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us? — Michel De Montaigne

Don't trust the one who stopped believing. Trust the one who never believed. — Marty Rubin

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning. — Barbara G. Walker

The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. — William Kingdon Clifford

That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe. — Adolf Von Harnack

Credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red — Lev Grossman

If I could do just one thing, it would be to dissociate faith from virtue, now and for good, and to expose it for what it is, a servile weakness, a refuge in cowardice, and a willingness to follow, with credulity, people who are in the highest degree unscrupulous. — Christopher Hitchens

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. — Paul Johnson

The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive ... No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity. — Charles Mackay

Cunning has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive. — Samuel Johnson

In the past, we had objects to believe in - objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, ... Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information. — Jean Baudrillard

The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory. — Robert Green Ingersoll

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind. — Joseph Conrad

If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. — Lyall Watson

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. — Anonymous

Our priests are not what a silly populace supposes; all their learning consists in our credulity. — Voltaire

Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food
and a spaniel, that prefers even punishment from one hand to caresses from another. But it is in love as in war, we are often more indebted for our success to the weakness of the defence than to the energy of the attack; for mere idleness has ruined more women than passion; vanity more than idleness, and credulity more than either. — Charles Caleb Colton

We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism - these still survive amongst us; and the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy. In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority. The — Will Durant

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself - perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force? - with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range. — Christopher Hitchens

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence. — Tryon Edwards

There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par. — Mark Twain

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and the relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie. — Samuel Johnson

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity. — George Bernard Shaw

A little doubt is better than total credulity — Al-Ma'arri

Credulity is perhaps a weakness almost inseparable from eminently truthful characters. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

The mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity. — Edward Clodd

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. — Carl Sagan

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. — George Bernard Shaw

Incredulity is not wisdom, but the worst kind of folly. It is folly, because it causes ignorance and mistake, with all the consequents of these; and it is very bad, as being accompanied with disingenuity, obstinacy, rudeness, uncharitableness, and the like bad dispositions; from which credulity itself, the other extreme sort of folly, is exempt. — Isaac Barrow

Generous souls
Are still most subject to credulity. — William Davenant

The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void. — Terence McKenna

The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity. — Benjamin Disraeli

credulity and superstition are close friends — Frederick Marryat

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. — George Bernard Shaw

The miracle of yeast is awesome enough to strain credulity. It's a fungus, a naturally occurring nanotechnological machine that converts sugar to the alcohol we drink. It breeds pretty much everywhere and is one of the organisms on which scientists have built much of our knowledge of how life works . . . and, postscript, it also makes possible the baking of bread. — Adam Rogers

Demon possession strains the boundaries of credulity, given the sheer number of times it seems to happen. One would really hope demons had better things to do with their time. — Kelley Armstrong

Credulity is always a ridiculous, often a dangerous failing: it has made of many a clever man, a fool; and of many a good man, a knave. — Frances Wright

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance. — Henry David Thoreau

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar. — Thomas Paine

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? — Christopher Hitchens

There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are — Samuel Johnson

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. — George Orwell

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe. — Thomas Paine

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

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

We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Credulity is always ridiculous. — Frances Wright

I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people. — Frederick The Great

Fear, if it be not immoderate, puts a guard about us that does watch and defend us; but credulity keeps us naked, and lays us open to all the sly assaults of ill-intending men: it was a virtue when man was in his innocence; but since his fall, it abuses those that own it. — Owen Feltham

How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death. — Jean Meslier

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind. — John Brunner

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Radical skepticism is no more critical than is credulity. — Craig A. Evans

The only disadvantage of an honest heart is credulity. — Philip Sidney

Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition. — John Arbuthnot

Skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence. — Christopher Hitchens

Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows--and that is saying a good deal. — Agatha Christie

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions! — Adam Sedgwick