#sceptic

How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'? ↗

— Jake Jesser

#crucifixion #death #mythology #perspective #religion

Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#immorality #scepticism #sin #life

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dislikes #racism #religion #scepticism #stupidity

It's against type in the sense of my background, but it's with type in the sense that I am a loner who's new to this business and sceptical about a lot of it. ↗

— Ben McKenzie

#against #am #background #business #i

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

#fortifies #more #nothing #scepticism #some

Scepticism is a necessary and vital part of the journalist's toolkit. But when scepticism becomes cynicism it can close off thought and block the search for truth. ↗

— Jeremy Paxman

#block #close #cynicism #journalist #necessary

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine. ↗

— Tim Minchin

#humor #pseudoscience #quackery #scepticism #humor

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair. ↗

— William Dunbar

#despair #emotional #full #ironic #mirth

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. ↗

— Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans

#faiths #mediocrity #paris #sceptic #courage

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#belief #capitalism #faith #grand-narratives #islam