Scepticism Quotes

“She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”
― Douglas Adams

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
― Stephen Roberts

“A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.”
― Ricky Gervais

“There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.”
― Richard Lederer, Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language

“You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.”
― Tim Minchin

“And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Scepticism is the first step towards truth.”
― Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques

“Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”
― David Hume, The Letters of David Hume

“Most people are too silly to be truly interested in any thing. They herd together like cattle, and do not know what is good for them.”
― Frank R. Stockton

“The business of scepticism is to be dangerous. Scepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of sceptical thought, they will probably not restrict their scepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channellees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“No ghosts need apply.

- Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the things they dislike (notably religion) and refusing to apply their skepticism to the things they do like (notably Darwinism). On two occasions I’ve urged Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, to put me on its editorial board as the resident skeptic of Darwinism. Though Shermer and I know each other and are quite friendly, he never got back to me about joining his editorial board.”
― William A. Dembski

“Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923

“In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause. This appalling blunder is comparable only to assigning the leper exclusive franchise to run beauty clinics in the society; this can only lead to cycles upon cycles of common infection syndrome.”
― Adebowale Babatunde Ojowuro, Echoes of Common Sense

“Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“When we hear the old bells ringing out on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves: can it be possible? This for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was the son of God. The proof of such a claim is wanting. Within our times the Christian religion is surely an antiquity jutting out from a far-distant olden time; and the fact that people believe such a claim...is perhaps the oldest part of this heritage. A god who conceives children with a mortal woman; a wise man who calls us to work no more; to judge no more; but to heed the signs of the imminent apocalypse; a justice that accepts the innocent man as a proxy sacrifice; someone who has his disciplines drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of the afterlife, to which death is the gate; the figure of the cross as a symbol, in a time that no longer knows the purpose and shame of the cross - how horribly all this wafts over us, as from the grave of the ancient past! Are we to believe that such things are still believed?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The one who says, "I search only for the truth, and nothing but the truth" is a candidate for the tyrant's throne. The one who says, "I have found the truth" is already sitting on it.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“The ingrained scepticism of the cold North fought a battle against mysterious and exciting forces from the ancient East.”
― H.R.F. Keating, The Perfect Murder

“Scepticism is an illness that kills Dreams”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!

“Theists pretend that their inferences are akin to “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” But they’re actual more like “where there’s smoke, there’s a dragon. And it’s using the plooms to talk to me.”
― @serpentinious7745

“A philosopher should not be afraid of scepticism, but should go on bruising his jaw. Perhaps the failure of metaphysics lies in the caution and timidity of metaphysicians, who seem ostensibly so brave. They have sought for rest—which they describe as the highest boon. Whereas they should have valued more than anything restlessness, aimlessness, even purposelessness. How can you tell when the partition will be removed? Perhaps at the very moment when man ceased his painful pursuit, settled all his questions and rested on his laurels, inert, he could with one strong push have swept through the pernicious fence which separated him from the unknowable. There is no need for man to move according to a carefully-considered plan. This is a purely aesthetic demand which need not bind us. Let man senselessly and deliriously knock his head against the wall—if the wall go down at last, will he value his triumph any the less?”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“If only there were cameras set up on the other side for the moment atheists open their eyes after they pass on and see that God isn't the 'Santa Claus for adults' of their perennial arguments. Even better, if a converted atheist came back to convert them all!”
― Stewart Stafford

“In Hume, Rationalism and scepticism existed peacefully side by side. Scepticism was for the study only, and was to be forgotten in the business of practical life. Moreover, practical life was to be governed, as far as possible, by those very methods of science which his scepticism impugned. Such a compromise was only possible for a man who was in equal parts a philosopher and a man of the world; there is also a flavour of aristocratic Toryism in the reservation of an esoteric unbelief for the initiated. The world at large refused to accept Hume’s doctrines in their entirety. His followers rejected his scepticism, while his German opponents emphasized it as the inevitable outcome of a merely scientific and rational outlook. Thus as the result of his teaching British philosophy became superficial, while German philosophy became anti-rational—in each case from fear of an unbearable Agnosticism. European thought has never recovered its previous whole-heartedness; among all the successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has meant some degree of madness. In the most recent discussions of the philosophy appropriate to quantum physics, the old debates raised by Hume are still proceeding.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Will to Doubt

“Most people do not fear death; they only fear
what they think will happen next.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Sips And Little Portions

“I [the sceptic] resolve not to believe my senses. I break my nose against a post that comes in my way; I step into a dirty kennel: and after twenty such wise and rational actions, I am taken up and clapped into a mad-house. Now, I confess I would rather make one of those credulous fools whom Nature imposes upon, than one of those wise and rational philosphers who resolve to withold assent at all this expense. If a man pretends to be a sceptic with regard to the information of sense, and yet prudently keep's out of harms way as other men do, he must excuse my suspicion that he either acts as a hypocrite, or imposes on himself.”
― Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense: A Critical Edition