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|  Peter Abelard | The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth. | |
| John Adams | Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell. | |
| Aesop | Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. | |
| Roger Bacon | There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge. | |
| Walter Bagehot | Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt. | |
| Hosea Ballou | Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way. | |
| Howard Beale | So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time. | |
| Jim Bishop | A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who’d rather write a good story. | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism. | |
| Edmund Burke | He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | By doubting we all come at truth. | |
| Morris R. Cohen | The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. | |
| Thomas Cooper | Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so. | |
| Demosthenes | There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. | |
| Rene Descartes | If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| John Dryden | We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity. | |
| Albert Einstein | The important thing is never to stop questioning. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| Bergan Evans | Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt. | |
| Abraham Flexner | We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Jerome D. Frank | Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. | |
| Robert Frost | A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. | |
| Margaret Fuller | I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | Curiosity is the kernal of forbidden fruit. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err. | |
| James A. Garfield | I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. | |
| Khalil Gibran | Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. | |
| Josiah William Gitt | Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed. | |
| Samuel Gompers | The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong. | |
| Jean Guitton | The tolerance of the skeptic… accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the “dogmatist.” | |
| Bernhard Haisch | Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification. | |
| Caryl Parker Haskins | A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Love your country, but never trust its government. | |
| Patrick Henry | Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! | |
| Richard Hofstadter | A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else. | |
| Thomas Holcroft | To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils. | |
| Sidney Hook | To silence criticism is to silence freedom. | |
| Robert M. Hutchins | A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin. | |
| George Iles | Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. | |
| William Ralph Inge | Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. | |
| Eugene Ionesco | It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final. | |
| Japanese Proverb | If you believe everything you read, you better not read. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence. | |
| George F. Kennan | The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. | |
| Paul Kurtz | Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom. | |
| Harold D. Lasswell | Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware. | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. | |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything. | |
| Robert Lindner | Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt. | |
| James Russell Lowell | A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. | |
| John Lubbock | If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. | |
| James Madison | Whilst we assert a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to choose minds who have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. | |
| James Madison | All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree. | |
| James Madison | All men having power ought to be mistrusted. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. | |
| Thomas Merton | I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful,
a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. | |
| C. Wright Mills | If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you will do will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell. | |
| Toni Morrison | Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this. | |
| George Jean Nathan | The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism. | |
| J. Robert Oppenheimer | There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. | |
| Charles S. Pierce | All the progress we have made in philosophy… is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom. | |
| Hungarian Proverb | The believer is happy, the doubter is wise. | |
| Snell Putney | There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism. | |
| Jonathan Rauch | A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. | |
| William Winwood Reade | What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin? | |
| Bertrand Russell | The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. | |
| Bertrand Russell | In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater. | |
| Carl Sagan | There is a lurking fear that some things are not meant “to be known,” that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. | |
| Carl Sagan | At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. | |
| Lord Herbert Louis Samuel | Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built. | |
| George Santayana | Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely. | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue... | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | The State…has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. | |
| Ignazio Silone | Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. | |
| Leslie Stephen | If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries. | |
| Leslie Stephen | Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. | |
| Paul Tillich | Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives. | |
| G. M. Trevelyan | Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the blood of real civilization. | |
| Mark Twain | I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition... (more) | |
| Mark Twain | When in doubt, tell the truth. | |
| Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo | The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found. | |
| Paul Valéry | The world acquires value only through its extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Voltaire | Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. | |
| Chad Walsh | From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else. | |
| George Washington | There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. | |
| Daniel Webster | Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety. | |
| Rebecca West | But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life. | |
| E. B. White | Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. | |
| Oscar Wilde | To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. | |
| Walter E. Williams | We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he’s friendly and cuddly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he’s still got teeth and claws. | |
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