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She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist. Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothing is more remarkable than the spread of scepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life. Charles Darwin, Autobiography: Religious Belief
The only respectable intellectual position is one of doubt, scepticism, reservation and free – I stress free – and unfettered enquiry. Christopher Hitchens v Dinesh D’Souza: The God Debate
If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle. Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
Is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes side in wars and human affairs? Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
The all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious enquiries. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua 1864
People like to say that faith and science can live together side by side, but I don’t think they can. They’re deeply opposed. Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt, questing with logic, evidence and reason to draw conclusions; faith by stark contrast demands a positive suspension of critical faculties. Science proceeds by setting up hypotheses, ideas or models and then attempts to disprove them, so a scientist is constantly asking questions, being sceptical. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil? The God Delusion, Channel 4 2006
The battle for evolution is just a skirmish in a larger war. A larger war for rationality, for scepticism, for critical thinking, for a rational scientific view. Richard Dawkins, with Dan Dennett & Sam Harris & Ayaan Hirsi Ali, GAC Melbourne 2012
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything. Thomas Henry Huxley, letter 22nd March 1886
We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth we need imagination and scepticism both. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, PBS 1980
A way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. Carl Sagan, interview Charlie Rose 27th May 1996
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything – new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science. Carl Sagan, ‘Why We Need to Understand Science’, article Skeptical Inquirer
If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Phd oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, ‘Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find? – because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I’m not prepared, I’m in deep trouble.’ Carl Sagan, ‘Wonder and Skepticism', Skeptical Inquirer 19:1 1995
The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us versus Them – the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. Carl Sagan, ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark’
It is the tension between creativity and scepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. Carl Sagan
Scepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism – and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. Stephen Jay Gould
Dogmatism and scepticism 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 ignorance. Bertrand Russell
I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development
Scepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy. Napoleon Bonaparte
Scepticism is the beginning of faith. Oscar Wilde
I am the man who announced global warming is a scam. John Coleman, weatherman Good Morning, America
And when we look at all the ice-cores that we’ve studied that’s exactly what happens – the temperature goes up and then CO2 starts pouring out of the sea, so it’s not the driver of global warming ... If you look at the real data which is the sun-spots on the sun, we are heading for thirty damned cold years ... You hear one side of the argument; you don’t hear the other side ... It is a total scam and it’s breaking very very rapidly ... It’s a wonderful way of controlling and taxing people. Professor David Bellamy, Late Late Show RTC1
We have suspected that there were just about two dozen people who around the world, mostly this side of the Atlantic and in America, who were putting this global warming scam together and actually driving it, rather than doing what the likes of Al Gore and the Politicians do – just drifting alone with it because they don’t know better ... Their data is no good. There’s going to have to be a criminal investigation ... Hey! This is weather data – it’s not a state secret ... These people are financial fraudsters. They took at least $20,000,000 that we can trace in recent years, in so-called grants for so-called scientific research and they did it on the basis of a financial and scientific fraud. So they should not only be locked up for concealing and destroying data that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act by other scientists, they should be also locked up for fraud and international racketeering. Lord Christopher Monckton, interview Alex Jones
A large numbers of emails between about two dozen malevolent crooked scientists right at the top of the Climatalogical tree. These are the people who between them have conspired to invent and then maintain the scare of global warming. And the emails came from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Centre which specialises in calculating the global temperature record for the whole world over the last hundred and fifty years ... Unfortunately, what they were doing at the Climate Research Centre, with active assistance from many other climate scientists around the world ... they were simply making up the temperature increases of the last twenty-five years. It’s fiction. It’s science fiction. It is racketeering. ibid.
ClimateGate: These are people who deserve to go to prison for a very long time. And I’ll tell you why I’m so angry about it ... Global warming isn’t killing anyone and it’s not going to kill anyone. What is killing people and it’s killing them by the millions of starvation now is the effect of the global warming scare. Because many nations including the United States have taken up to a third of their agricultural land out from growing food for people who needed it to buying bio-fuels for clunckers that didn’t. And that has meant in the last year or two a doubling, and I mean a doubling, of world food prices. ibid.
The word Government actually appears in the Treaty in this context for the first time that I’ve ever seen it ... All in the name of saving the planet for a problem we know is not really a problem. That’s exactly their ambition. They want nothing less than total world domination, to use the old phrase ... They want to it by a stealthy bureaucratic coup-d’état. ibid.