Credulous Quotes & Sayings

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

Listen, if you walk into a whorehouse and find yourself getting sucked off, it's because you put some money on the counter, not because the gods transported a pair of lips to your cock.' 'That's . . . a really incredible metaphor, Jean, but I think I could use some help translating it.' 'What I'm saying is, we have a duty to accept on faith, but also a duty to weigh and judge. Once you insist that some mundane thing was actually the miraculous hand of the gods, why not treat everything that way? When you start finding messages from the heavens in your breakfast sausages, you've thrown aside your responsibility to use your head. If the gods wanted credulous idiots for priests, why wouldn't they make you that way when you were chosen? — Scott Lynch

O hard-believing love, how strange it seems!
Not to believe, and yet too credulous:
Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes;
Despair and hope make thee ridiculous:
The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely,
In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly. — William Shakespeare

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. — George Orwell

If any one giveth thee excessive Praises more than can handsomely belong to thee, thou art to think of him, that he taketh thee for vain and credulous, and easy to be deceived, and effectually a Fool. — Thomas Fuller

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. — Albert J. Nock

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. — Vladimir Nabokov

Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue. — Pavan K. Varma

The most positive men are the most credulous. — Alexander Pope

When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous. — Calvin Coolidge

So glistered the dire Snake , and into fraud Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the Tree Of Prohibition, root of all our woe. — John Milton

Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole. — Honore De Balzac

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black. — Neil Gaiman

The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance. — Eric Hoffer

Women are more credulous than men. — Victor Hugo

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself. — Jean Cocteau

People in great institutions are occasionally credulous. — Malcolm Gladwell

A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement."
~Sherlock Holmes — Stephanie Osborn

I don't consider myself to be that credulous. — Christopher Hitchens

Ignorance and credulous hope make the market for most proprietary remedies. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. — Mikhail Bakunin

The functions of the human frame are, broadly speaking, known. They are a country, anyhow, that has been charted and mapped out. But outside that lie huge tracts of undiscovered country, which certainly exist, and the real pioneers of knowledge are those who, at the cost of being derided as credulous and superstitious, want to push on into
those misty and probably perilous places. I felt that I could be of more use by setting out without compass or knapsack into the mists than by sitting in a cage like a canary and chirping about what was known. Besides, teaching is very very bad for a man who knows himself only to be a learner: you only need to be a self-conceited ass to teach. — E.F. Benson

Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them ... It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it. — George Sarton

There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous. — George MacDonald

Sceptics are yet the most credulous. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible. — Alexander Chase

Mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means — Steven Pinker

Modest wisdom plucks me from over-credulous haste. — William Shakespeare

What a weak, credulous, incredulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me ... I should prefer the obedience, affections and instinct of a dog before it. — Michael Faraday

Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists. — Terry Pratchett

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science. — Vladimir Nabokov

A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such. — Samuel Butler

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know
an authority good for nothing. — Augustus William Hare

I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.) — Joyce Carol Oates

Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense. — Honore De Balzac

The thief who is in prison is not necessarily more dishonest than his fellows at large, but mostly one who, through ignorance or stupidity [or racism or poverty! - Draffan] steals in a way that is not customary. He snatches a loaf from the baker's counter and is promptly run into gaol. Another man snatches bread from the table of hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls who do not know the ways of company promoters; and, as likely as not, he is run into Parliament. — George Bernard Shaw

I do think you should be more careful how you choose your friends. You are so credulous, dear, so easily gulled. I suppose it is being a writer and having so much imagination. If you were older and had more experience of life you would have been on guard at once. — Agatha Christie

The search of the Holy Grail or the voyage towards a new continent never enlisted so much energy and so much faith as does this pursuit of youth by old age. It is a race not of the fleet but of the most credulous. — Elisabeth Marbury

The incredulous are the more credulous. They believe the miracles of Vespasian that they may not believe those of Moses.
[Fr., Incredules les plus credules. Ils croient les miracle de Vespasien, pour ne pas croire ceux de Moise.] — Blaise Pascal

It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity's great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact. — Christopher Hitchens

Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise. — Idries Shah

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism! — Joyce Carol Oates

All this is nothing better than the jargon of a conjuror, who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Priests and conjurors are of the same trade. — Thomas Paine

The credulous ... advance the authority of hearsay in place of reasons for possible success or facts that can be demonstrated. — Vannoccio Biringuccio

Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive. — Eliza Cook

Sim would begin: 'there was a herd in Manar, they ca'd him Tweedie - ye'll mind Tweedie, Can'lish?' 'Fine, that!' said Candlish. 'Aweel, Tweedie had a dog - ' The story I have forgotten; I dare say it was dull, and I suspect it was not true; but indeed, my travels with the drove rendered me indulgent, and perhaps even credulous, in the matter of dog stories. — Anonymous

Our species will never run out of fools but I dare say that there have been at least as many credulous idiots who professed faith in god as there have been dolts and simpletons who concluded otherwise. — Christopher Hitchens

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons. — Penelope Lively

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life. — Sinclair Lewis

Blue was a natural result of a home like this: confident, strange, credulous, curious. — Maggie Stiefvater

He was as yet not sufficiently experienced in ruffianism to know that one villain always sacrifices another to advance his own project; he was credulous enough to believe in the old adage of honor amongst thieves. — Emile Gaboriau

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Popular Prejudice, having decided that woman is a poor, weak creature, credulous,
easily influenced, holds that she is of necessity timid; that if she were allowed as
much as a voice in the government of her native country, she would stand appalled if
war were even hinted at. If it be proved by hard facts that woman is not a poor, weak
creature, then she must be reprimanded as being masculine. To brand a woman as being
masculine, is supposed to be quite sufficient to drive her cowering back to her
embroidery-frame and her lute. — Ellen C. Clayton

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites. — Philip Pullman

Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams - but it never builds. — William Manchester

It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly - this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power. — A.J. Arberry

Men love a prop so well, that they will lean on a pointed poisoned spear; and such was he, the impostor, who, with fear of hell for his scourge, most ravenous wolf, played the driver to a credulous flock. — Mary Shelley

Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of "the Enlightenment." Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition - or impermeable partition - between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. — David Bentley Hart

The religion which treats its flock as a credulous plaything offers one of the cruelest spectacles that can be imagined: a human being in fear and doubt who is openly exploited to believe in the impossible — Christopher Hitchens

The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, - that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, - that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, - that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; - by such reflections as these ... I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. — Charles Darwin

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. — George Eliot

be neither unduly credulous nor wholly disbelieving for the Indies would have gone undiscovered if no one believed Columbus — Richard Stanyhurst

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. — Christopher Hitchens

Credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final — Donna Tartt

None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits. — Edmund Crispin

Women are proverbially credulous. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be ... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. — Adam Smith

social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be philosophical in the moral. It is true, indeed, that dim — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated. — John Dryden

If civilization is in danger today ... it will do so with the enthusiastic assistance of credulous people. They seem to me more dangerous than the most brazen leaders, because everything is done with their cooperation. — Anatoly Kuznetsov

Some are so uncharitable as to think all women bad, and others are so credulous as to believe they are all good. All will grant her corporeal frame more wonderful and more beautiful than man's. And can we think God would put a worse soul into a better body? — Owen Feltham

Superstitious notions propagated in infancy are hardly ever totally eradicate, not even in minds grown strong enough to despise the like credulous folly in others. — Samuel Richardson

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its) - Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world - a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious - surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity. — Walt Whitman

Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, themost rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing. — Jane Austen

I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation"! — H. P. Blavatsky

The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases: (a) the lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future; (b) the hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future; (c) the vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations; (d) the development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible. — Irving Fisher

In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the skeptical world of science and the credulous world of religious belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both. — Carl Sagan

All people are most credulous when they are most happy. — Walter Bagehot

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.
Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed ... — Adolfo Bioy Casares

It's amazing how an otherwise intelligent person can become a credulous fool as soon as you mention the words "organic," "authentic," and "Gweneth Paltrow. — Sophie Kinsella

Women suffer more from disappointment than men, because they have more of faith and are naturally more credulous. — Margaret Of Valois

The psychology of sanction.' 'If you're right, then why does anyone protest against torture? Why don't we all just go, "Oh well, we've seen how well it works in the movies, let's just go along with it"?' Carol leaned on her fists on the edge of his bed as she spoke, her tumbled blonde hair falling into her eyes. 'Carol, you might not have noticed, but there's a significant number of people out there who do say just that. Look at the opposition in the US when the Senate decided to outlaw torture just the other year. People believe in its efficacy precisely because they've seen it in the movies. And some of those believers are in positions of power. The reason we don't all fall for it is that we're not all equally credulous. Some of us are much more critical of what we see and read than others. But you can fool some of the people all of the time. And when spooks and cops go bad, that's what they rely on.' She — Val McDermid

Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity. — Edward Gibbon

The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery. — William Kingdon Clifford

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

There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables. — Pablo Neruda

A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion - wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P.T. Barnum meant when he said, There's a sucker born every minute'. But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney. — Carl Sagan

You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious. — Denis Diderot

The most innocent heart is generally the most credulous. — Samuel Richardson

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason — Thomas Paine

Pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold. — Catharine Beecher

Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. — Bertrand Russell

In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love is a credulous thing. — Ovid

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

Royalty has traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrology was the exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of this potent art was considered a capital offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters - unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in America; its venue is worldwide. — Carl Sagan