186 Quotes by Michael Shermer

Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural.

In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that ‘to understand all is to forgive all,’ I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because ’to condemn much is to understand.

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.

The components of a philosophy must stand or fall on their own internal consistency or empirical support, regardless of the founder’s or followers’ personality quirks or moral inconsistencies.