Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before...

Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the...

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.

The greatest tragedy with a sceptic is that he cannot consign himself to truth, however he may see it.

To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it’s as if they can’t get past their emotions, and...

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary...

Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its...

. . . I don’t believe that celebrity spokeswomen get their hair colour from a box.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist...

Most people are too silly to be truly interested in any thing. They herd together like cattle, and do not know what is good for them.

A Christian telling an atheist they’re going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they’re not getting any presents from Santa.

Scepticism is the first step towards truth.

The merits and services of Christianity have been industriously extolled by its hired advocates. Every Sunday its praises are sounded from myriads of pulpits. It enjoys the prestige of an ancient establishment and the comprehensive...

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most...

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

It could always all be unreal – how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly...

Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.

No ghosts need apply. – Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise.

Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier.” (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner – “Mr. Kafka don’t eat eggs.

It seems to me that they only seem to mention things in the Bible that are within a 5 mile radius of the guy writing it.

The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause....

How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’?

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/’woo’], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education...

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the...

Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

[Charles] Nodier’s later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of...

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it’s just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.