Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.
Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.
Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.
Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.
I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.
We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.
I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.
Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.
Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Tenure in any department is serious business, because it means, essentially, employment for life.
There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God.
The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.
For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.
People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.
The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).
The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.
Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.
Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.
Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.