#skeptic

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#independent-thought #opinions #skepticism #thinking #independence

I'm the most cynical person, and I know what that sounds like when you say, I don't drink and drive, and I don't. But I know people look at that with skepticism, and I understand. ↗

— Tracey Gold

#drink #drive #i #know #like

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts. ↗

— Thomas Henry Huxley

#faith #religion #science #skepticism #faith

We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor. ↗

— David Watson

#magical-thinking #religion #science #skepticism #experience

Believers in psychic phenomena... appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition.... This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians.... Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance. ↗

— George R. Price

#psi #skepticism #experience

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#freedom-of-thought #independent-thought #skepticism #freedom

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#rationality #science #skepticism #intelligence

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#doubt #inteligencia #intelligence #la-duda #skepticism

Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven not how the heavens go. ↗

— Galileo Galilei

#science #skepticism #men

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#skepticism #men