#skepticism

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. ↗

— Dallas Willard

#doubt #skepticism #age

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. ↗

— Mark Twain

#agnosticism #atheism #atheist #freedom #god

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. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#religion #science #skepticism #age

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press. ↗

— Thomas Griffith

#attitude #finds #now #practiced #preached

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason ↗

— Steven Pinker

#life

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls. ↗

— Emile M. Cioran

#sadism #skepticism #souls

Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history. ↗

— Samuel E. Morison

#historical #history #hitherto #important #point

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good. ↗

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#agencies #been #birth #conservatives #endowed

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#both #certain #certainty #dissipate #dogmatism

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#being #believed #her #kept #nothing