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.more Peter Abelard quotes |
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.more John Adams quotes |
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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.more Roger Bacon quotes |
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.more Walter Bagehot quotes |
Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way.more Hosea Ballou quotes |
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.more Howard Beale quotes |
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.more Isaiah Berlin quotes |
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.more Jim Bishop quotes |
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.more Justice William J. Brennan quotes |
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.more Edmund Burke quotes |
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.more Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotes |
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.more Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotes |
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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.more Thomas Cooper quotes |
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.more Clarence S. Darrow quotes |
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.more Clarence S. Darrow quotes |
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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.more Demosthenes quotes |
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.more Rene Descartes quotes |
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.more William O. Douglas quotes |
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.more Frederick Douglass quotes |
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.more John Dryden quotes |
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Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?more Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes |
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.more Bergan Evans quotes |
Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.more Bergan Evans quotes |
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.more Abraham Flexner quotes |
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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.more Benjamin Franklin quotes |
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I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.more Margaret Fuller quotes |
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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.more Josiah William Gitt quotes |
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.more Samuel Gompers quotes |
The tolerance of the skeptic… accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the “dogmatist.”more Jean Guitton quotes |
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All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.more Judge Learned Hand quotes |
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.more Caryl Parker Haskins quotes |
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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!more Patrick Henry quotes |
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.more Richard Hofstadter quotes |
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A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death.more Robert M. Hutchins quotes |
