#Skepticism Quotes

“But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

“A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.”

“Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.”

“The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.”

“Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.”

“The patient, treated on the fashionable theory, sometimes gets well in spite of the medicine.”

“What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?”

“Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come, when you do call for them?”

“Either they're trying to con you or they're trying to con themselves.”

“Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?”

“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”

“Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government?”

“The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.”

“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

“Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.”

“Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time.”

“Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.”

“Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”

“Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”

“The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.”

“Although I held public office for a total of sixteen years, I also thought of myself as a citizen-politician, not a career one. Every now and then when I was in government, I would remind my associates that "When we start thinking of government as 'us' instead of 'them,' we've been here too long." By that I mean that elected officeholders need to retain a certain skepticism about the perfectibility of government.”

“The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.”

“If it's the Psychic Network why do they need a phone number?”

“Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?”

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

“Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”

“Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.”

“It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't.”

“This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.”

“I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.”

“Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.”

“Great intellects are skeptical.”

“There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.”

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow.”

“Believe everything you read”

“First rule in this world baby... don't believe ANYTHING you see on the news.”

“I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a most welcome veil over a pudendum--and so a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing else.”

“Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of “experts” who made them up in the first place.”

“Music's all right John, but you'll never make a living out of it.”

“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.”

“...I will not allow books to prove any thing." "But how shall we prove any thing?" "We never shall.”

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

“Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give $200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn't mean a damn thing. After they've eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I'm not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway.”

“All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.”

“A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.”

“We come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious indeed; and moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.”

“I trust Russia and China and Iran and North Korea like I trust a Jussie Smollett police report.”