Skeptic Quotes - page 2

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antobodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. (Timothy Keller)
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
Eric Ambler
I would say that Barack Obama has always been a real optimist about what can be accomplished. He believes that government can be used to create systemic, long-term, real change. And the first lady is more of a skeptic.
Jodi Kantor
Michelle Obama has gone from political skeptic to political partner to a woman with a White House agenda of her own, and an approval rating higher than the president's.
Jodi Kantor
Once upon a time, I was a climate-change skeptic.
James Balog
I really don't have a lot of interest in national politics, and it's because I'm a skeptic. I think you can accomplish a lot more locally. I don't want to spin the wheels and not get anything done.
Ron Conway
I'm a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
Michael Shermer
My brothers, They never went blind for what they did, but I may as well have. In the name of the Father, the Skeptic and the Son, I had one more stupid question.
Alanis Morissette
Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
Ravi Zacharias
Although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, he was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Jonathan Miller
The skeptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true. (Aleister Crowley)
The only wisdom I think I've attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people's ideology and other people's arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don't like dogmatic approaches by anybody.
Joseph Heller
I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic - the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument .
Walter Gilbert
If the skeptic still wants to complain that God killed women and children in the Old Testament, he should realize that He did more than that. He proclaimed the death sentence on the entire human race - every man, woman, and child. We will all die because we have sinned against God.
Ray Comfort
Here's what any skeptic will find hard to swallow. The Lord Jesus Christ owned that donkey. He created every hair on its little head (see John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16), and you can't steal what you own. The temporal 'owner' was in reality just taking care of it for Him. How incredible that the Lord had need of a little donkey. But He did. He chose to be carried into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey. God has also chosen lowly creatures like us to carry the Savior to this sinful world. How incredible.
Ray Comfort
But if philosophy is to serve a positive purpose, it must not teach mere skepticism, for, while the dogmatist is harmful, the skeptic is useless. 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 of ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anyone who dismisses out of hand evidence that U. S. intelligence agencies still do some of the things that they now brag about having done not too long ago is not a skeptic, but a fool.
Barrett Brown
I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man... Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes.
Jim Geraghty
For the skeptic finds that he also was in search of objective truth: and that the absolute truth of his statement is irrelevant to his quest. Whence his skepticism toward objective truth remains unanswered.
William Ernest Hocking
Everything good, fine or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The following is an attempt to systematize alike the data of mysticism and the results of comparative religion. The skeptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true. Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.
Aleister Crowley
Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man - and believe that it is Wikipedia's responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are.
Deepak Chopra
Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
George Carlin is now in hell, and it is not relevant that George Carlin boasted that he does not believe in hell when he lived on Earth. Be assured, Carlin believes in hell now... George Carlin, the filthy blasphemer, the obscene potty-mouth skeptic, agnostic and profane atheist, who had nothing but disdain for the God and the Bible all the days of his tragic life, is now at this minute and forever writhing and screaming in exquisite pain, pleading for mercy from that God he flipped off while performing for HBO lucre... When Carlin died, June 22nd, he split hell wide open...Hell from below was moved beneath thee at thy coming, it stirreth up the dead for thee. Are thou as weak as we George Carlin?! The worm is spread under thee and the worm covers thee.George Carlin is in hell. Deal with it. You will soon join him there. America is doomed. We will picket George Carlin's funeral..Amen!
Fred Phelps