Sceptics Quotes & Sayings

The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic. — Chris Hedges

The Bible has a human history as well as a divine inspiration. It is a history full of interest, and it is one which all those who value their Bible should know, at least in outline, if only that they may be able to meet the criticisms of sceptics and the ignorant. — Frederic G. Kenyon

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. — Carl Sagan

It's not possible that the problems of this world be resolved by the pesimists and sceptics whose horizons are guided by the obvious realities. We need men and women who think of things that have never been thought of and who dream of things that have never been dreamed of, and who ask, "Why not?"
[It sounds better in Spanish]
No es posible que los problemas de este mundo sean resueltos por pesamistas y esepticos cuyos horizontes esten guiados por las obvias realidades. Necesitamos hombres y mujeres que piensen en cosas que nunca se hayan pensado y que suenen en cosas que nunca se hayan sonado, y que se pregunten '?porque no? — Spencer W. Kimball

Academic sceptics argued for the conclusion that knowledge was impossible; Pyrrhonian sceptics aimed to reach no conclusions at all, suspending judgement on all questions, even the question of the possibility of knowledge. — Jennifer Nagel

doubters only doubt what they doubt — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All their principles are true, sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc...but their conclusions are false, because the contrary principles are also true. — Blaise Pascal

I accept sceptics, you've got to have challenges. — Dan Aykroyd

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

{Letter to his brother, 1861}

... I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths... But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction. — Alfred Russel Wallace

I note that warmists are often banging on about the fact that sceptics like Christopher Booker and myself 'only' have arts degrees. But actually that's our strength, not our weakness. Our intellectual training qualifies us better than any scientist - social or natural sciences - for us to understand that this is, au fond, not a scientific debate but a cultural and rhetorical one. — James Delingpole

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong. — Blaise Pascal

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion. — John Stuart Mill

What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours. — James Lovelock

The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement. — Immanuel Kant

The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die. — G.K. Chesterton

The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. — Thomas Huxley

Materialism prevails in Europe today. You may pray for the salvation of the modern sceptics, but they do not yield, they want reason. — Swami Vivekananda

The last thing I'll say for the people that don't believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't dream big and I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles ... — Lance Armstrong

I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate. — Scarlett Thomas

Truth exists. The sole purpose of this proposition is to assert the existence of truth against imbeciles and sceptics. — Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury

I'm an ambitious self-publicist out of necessity. I've never been one to miss an opportunity because I've never had any illusions about how hard it is to survive as a painter ... It's been an extra driving force to be able to prove the sceptics wrong. — Stuart Pearson Wright

In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. — Carl Sagan

When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenomena 'signs', the sceptics 'coincidence', and psychologists 'concentrated focus', although I've yet to find out what term historians would use). — Paulo Coelho

The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it
and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics. — Beryl Markham

Argument and counterargument were clearly present, and that would have been sufficient to prompt the radical conclusion (drawn, it seems, by the Buddha, and perhaps by Indian sceptics and others) of suspension of judgment as a means to liberation, rather than as a means for pursuing a search for "truth" about what is nonevident. — Adrian Kuzminski

I come from a generation of sceptics, who do not believe what politicians say. The Labour Party wants to convince people through actions, not words. The Nationalist party have given the country 25 years of lies, the Labour Party will build the country anew. — Joseph Muscat

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

The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.

If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics. — Raymond Aron

While I wanted to think everything false, it must necessarily be that I who thought was something; and remarking that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so solid and so certain that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of upsetting it, I judged that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I sought. — Bertrand Russell

It is effectively BBC policy to ignore climate change sceptics. — Peter Sissons

The sceptics assert, though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects,as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. — David Hume

There was no sign of Plato, and I was told later that he had gone to live in his Republic, where he was cheerfully submitting to his own Laws. [ ... ] None of the Stoics were present. Rumour had it that they were still clambering up the steep hill of Virtue [ ... ]. As for the Sceptics, it appeared that they were extremely anxious to get there, but still could not quite make up their minds whether or not the island really existed. — Lucian Of Samosata

The objection that the doctrine of Jesus is excellent but impracticable, comes not only from believers, but from sceptics, from those who do not believe, or think that they do not believe, in the dogmas of the fall of man and the redemption; from men of science and philosophers who consider themselves free from all prejudice. They believe, or imagine that they believe, in nothing, and so consider themselves as above such a superstition as the dogma of the fall and the redemption. — Leo Tolstoy

Sceptics are generally ready to believe anything, provided it is sufficiently improbable. — Karl Ludwig Von Knebel

From the apparent usefulness of the social virtues, it has readily been inferred by sceptics, both ancient and modern, that all moral distinctions arise from education, and were, at first, invented, and afterwards encouraged ... in order to render men tractable, and subdue their natural ferocity and selfishness, which incapacitated them for society. — David Hume

Unfortunately for Hegel, both common sense and genius are more readily accessible than a continuous chain of reasoning that is directed at establishing the identity of one's world-knowledge with one's self-knowledge, slowly and painfully, without ever letting one slip back into the comfortable conviction of Stoic and Sceptic alike that what happens, or has happened, in one's world does not really matter to one. — H.S. Harris

Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what's going on, the spirits vanish. They're shy, we're told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the 'observer effect': those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they need is darkness and gullibility. — Carl Sagan

Sceptics have often pointed out that no archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ has been discovered. And they are correct. — John D. Morris