385 Quotes About Skepticism

... skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill

He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.

While skepticism is healthy, cynicism, real cynicism, is toxic.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

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.

Begin with disbelief. Analyse, test, prove everything, and then take it.