Dogmatists Quotes & Sayings

Nature confuses the skeptics and reason confutes the dogmatists — Blaise Pascal

Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies
people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them! — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment ... And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good ... This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. — Sam Harris

It is, indeed, strange how often persons, living in other respects quite unobjectively, can suddenly become acutely objective about some specific concern of their own. — Anthony Powell

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger. — William Shakespeare

I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists. — Walter Cronkite

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners. — Frans De Waal

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things. — Henri Poincare

We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late when they pass away. — George Harrison

I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. — G.K. Chesterton

The skeptic, being a lover of his kind, desires to cure by speech, as best he can, the self-conceit and rashness of the dogmatists. — Sextus Empiricus

If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise. — Peter Kreeft

Goddamnit Stone, I'm going to make it someday! I'm going to be the one in Rolling Stone magazine, and they're going to be talking about my fabulous technique and how goddamn awesome I am on guitar! I'm going to get there because of what I know, and what I can do, and NOT because of the size of my tits! — Shari Copell

The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it. — Bertrand Russell

I think being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, non-committed to a cause - but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism.
[Interview with Ron Powers (Chicago Sun Times) for Playboy, 1973] — Walter Cronkite

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over. — Tom Robbins

Dogmatists are strange hyenas. They feed on the carrion of those thoughts they killed themselves. — Gabriel Laub

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability. — Oscar Wilde

If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists
and I am inclined to think it is so
it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool. — Charles Caleb Colton

We all know dogmatists who are more concerned about holding their opinions than about investigating their truth ... if they are mistaken, they will never discover it; they have condemned themselves to perpetual error. Human beings (including myself) sometimes use their beliefs for wish-fulfillment. Too often we believe what we want to be true. — David L. Wolfe

Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it's his job to prevent this closure. — Nathan Hill

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. — Bertrand Russell

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed. — Umberto Eco

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life. — Doris Lessing

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. — Jacob Bronowski

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman - what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women - that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it. — Sarah Manguso

All the rain that fell since the world began won't cure today's drought. — Marty Rubin

At this moment in time," came the hiss in his ear, "we know two things. But only one of them is a game changer. — J.R. Ward

I became friends on a social basis with a music professor (Dr. Alan Stein) who took a real interest in my work.He encouraged me in countless different ways, urged me to try different arranging styles, etc. — John Keltonic

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. — Alfred North Whitehead