Not Gullible Quotes & Sayings

There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare - particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for - that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer. — Peter Medawar

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did.

-- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5 — Christopher R. Browning

if we seek to follow Jesus, we must be passers-by of many things around us: we should keep alert, we should discern where we are, we ought at times to avoid and not touch; we shouldn't condemn, but neither should we be duped or gullible or willing to buy the latest cultural dope on offer; we should just move along, behaving circumspectly and speaking up when necessary - boldly, charitably, humbly - and hope that our dissimilarity from many societal norms will testify to others that there exists a better, more peaceable, more loving way to live. — Addison Hodges Hart

Evolution is unobservable. It's based on blind faith in a few dry bones and on unreliable dating systems in which the gullible trust. Kids should be allowed to make up their own minds about this issue, and not be censored to 'one side is all we will let you hear.' — Ray Comfort

Normally I would not recommend a book that tells you how to make money in the stock market. Most of these books are aimed at gullible folk, and they usually make much more money for their authors than they do for the investing public. — Gavyn Davies

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious. — Colin Wilson

Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. — John Updike

All too easily, however, we can become distracted, scared, frustrated, gullible, cynical, or just plain inattentive. We suppress our natural questing spirit. We plow ahead without taking a good, hard look at what we're doing and why. And whether we realize it or not, we buy into ready made systems of thought, habit, and belief sold to us by our culture, families, friends, and associates. We fall into step with the herd and almost unthinkingly adhere to whatever cult(ure) we're brought up in, unconsciously living our received beliefs and assumptions, for the most part without question or examination. — Lama Surya Das

Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded. — Nick Hornby

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality. — George Bernard Shaw

The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police. — Kevin Myers

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. — David James Duncan

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. — Roger Kimball

All of it. Especially the arrogant notion that the world will end just because humans might not make it through this century. We were never properly grateful for making it through the last century, as far as I'm concerned. Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we'll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible. You're afraid it's the End Times because we're surrounded by death and ruin. Nurse Willowes, don't you know? Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That's us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe." "Who — Joe Hill

Many people are partial to the notion that ... all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in control. This is a variation on that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book.' This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen. — Paul Collins

The young people who join extremist groups are clearly suffering from massive deficiencies in religious knowledge and are often politically gullible (when they are not attempting to salve pangs of conscience by cutting themselves off from a life of delinquency). — Tariq Ramadan

[Con] men have long known ... that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. — Thomas Sowell

You set me up," I say. "One big con. You can't blame me because I turned out not to be gullible enough. You can't blame the mark. That's not how it works. Have some respect for the nature of the game. — Holly Black

Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity — Frank Wynne

It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them. — Andrea Dworkin

Putin had told Yeltsin that he did not like election campaigns, and now he dismissed campaign promises as unachievable lies told by politicians and denigrated television advertisements as unseemly manipulation of gullible consumers. — Steven Lee Myers

The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust ... — Carl R. Rogers

Nowadays, by contrast, Christianity specialises in soft-focus mood music; its threats of hell, its demand for poverty and chastity, its doctrine that only the few will be saved and the many damned, have been shed, replaced by strummed guitars and saccharine smiles. It has reinvented itself so often, and with such breath-taking hypocrisy, in the interests of retaining its hold on the gullible, that a medieval monk who woke today, like Woody Allen in Sleeper, would not be able to recognise the faith that bears the same name as his own. — A.C. Grayling

Don't waste my time- I'm not stupid, and I'm not gullible. — Laura Schlessinger

People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels. — Charles Fort

People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars. — Paul Craig Roberts

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. — Caitlin Moran

The Palestinians were deliberately forced into refugee camps by their fellow Muslims and not permitted to integrate in any way into the society of their unwilling hosts. Their own people didn't even try to help them; instead they prevailed upon the United Nations and gullible Western charities to supply the refugees' needs. They have been kept in these camps for more than sixty years - like an unhealed wound by their own people - just to be used as political pawns by Muslim negotiators to charge their plight as "Israeli aggression. — Hal Lindsey

If others think I am nuts, naive, gullible, and not living in the real world, that's all right, too... I'll gladly stay in what some have called my fictitious world, my happy and peaceful world, a world full of signs of hope. — Ward Foley

The most difficult lesson is not being bitter - that balancing you need to do so you don't become bitter, even as you cease being gullible. — Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Nothing wrong with gullible. How you be happy if not gullible? — Cynthia Kadohata

In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth. — Warren Buffett