Unskeptical Quotes & Sayings

Ah, what a beautiful illustration of the completely open mind - utterly undiscriminating, lacking any criteria for acceptance, blissfully and uncritically according every idea its full respect. But, of course, it's a lie: they don't regard every idea as equally deserving. They clearly consider the atheist idea that the sacraments of their faith are empty foolishness to be an outrage. Rather, what they love is the idea that everyone else must respect their beliefs, no matter what they are, and that any disagreement is an insult. This is exactly the kind of uncritical, unskeptical, nonjudgmental idiocy that all religions seek to promulgate, because they all know that if we tore off the blinders of tradition and artificiality and mindless etiquette, we'd see right through their lies. Respect every idea! Especially mine! And if you find stupid the idea that this cracker is a god, why, you must be disrespectful and no gentleman! My — P.Z. Myers

When the boy sits up, ... , holds his holy votive tablet up with both hands as if to heaven, up at the level of his head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despair to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons. — Ali Smith

Glanced past Ben but didn't register him, his eyes floating out to an imaginary — Gillian Flynn

Have you heard about the Irishman who reversed into a car boot sale and sold the engine? — Frank Carson

The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now. — Barbara Deming

Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal. — Ian McEwan

Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses. — Noel Coward

I think we ought to leave the law exactly the way it is, the 14th amendment. — Rick Scott

I stood there looking stupid, because that's what I do when I'm accused of something I didn't do. Forget making a case or, you know, denying that I'd done it.

Denying hadn't helped me in the past. — Francesca Zappia

You can't expect people to do the right thing or else they will go to hell. We are already in hell! — Adrian Grenier

Blood and bodies and death and power. — Martin Amis

You can't go to the pharmacy to buy a pack of experience, you have to be in those games in order to acquire that experience. — Bob Hartley

I'm not saying all the women were hot. Some of them, if they fell overboard, they'd be harpooned by Japs. — Dave Barry

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