Incredulity Quotes
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
Niccolò Machiavelli
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
C. P. Snow
Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.
Richard Dawkins
I now make the only true statement you are to expect – that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers' incredulity.
Lucian
"That light," said the Chaplain, "is it going up or coming down?"
"It's coming down," said Lord Asriel, "but it isn't light. It's Dust."
Something in the way he said it made Lyra imagine dust with a capital letter, as if this wasn't ordinary dust. The reaction of the Scholars confirmed her feeling, because Lord Asriel's words caused a sudden collective silence, followed by gasps of incredulity.
Philip Pullman
The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx.
Jean-François Lyotard
The old "double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman's virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i.e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.
Camille Paglia
Those who catch faint glimpses, in Birmingham or Notting Hill, of what others have dreaded for years, those who find themselves strangers and aliens in one familiar area after another of an English town or city, those who hear from others' lips with diminishing incredulity the circumstances in which less fortunate fellow-citizens live, should repeat to themselves over and over again one single sentence, sad, simple and true: "You have seen nothing yet". Then let them give to those who presume to represent and govern them no peace and no respite until they have led the nation from under the shadow of the disaster which overhangs it.
Enoch Powell
The roar of the.45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in.
"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.
Mickey Spillane
Scilla, a Sicilian painter, published in l670, a work on the fossils of Calabria, illustrated by good engravings. This was written in Latin, with great spirit and elegance, and it proves the continued ascendency of dogmas often refuted; for we find the wit and eloquence of the author chiefly directed against the obstinate incredulity of naturalists, as to the organic nature of fossil shells.
Charles Lyell
The Italian metaphysical movement [initiated by De Chirico ] started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch. The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality. Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even believe in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables.
Salvador Dalí
I have obtained... spark discharges extending through more than one hundred feet and carrying currents of one thousand amperes, electromotive forces approximating twenty million volts, chemically active streamers covering areas of several thousand square feet, and electrical disturbances in the natural media surpassing those caused by lightning, in intensity.
Whatever the future may bring, the universal application of these great principles is fully assured, though it may be long in coming. With the opening of the first power plant, incredulity will give way to wonderment, and this to ingratitude, as ever before.
Nikola Tesla
