Skeptical Quotes
Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason [...] is like giving medicine to the dead.
If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don`t work, you must throw them away. Don`t waste any neurons on what doesn`t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What`s left is magic. And it doesn`t work.
The history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
There is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
It`s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity`s highest callings.