All Quotes By Tag: Belief

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

“Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”

“Mithorden said it well,” she said finally. “It’s worshipping death. They say they follow light. But, in the end, they’re really following desolation, division, the end of things. You should hear their prophecies — war, destruction, only special chosen people are spared.” She felt sad and angry. Worse, she wondered to what ends people who believed these things would go to assert their views.”

“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn’t perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.”

“Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.”

“When your only regret is if anyone thinks you regret anything – that is the definition of conviction.”

“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.”

“It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.”

“I believe in evolution in the sense that a short-tempered man is the successor of a crybaby.”

“Of course you don’t believe in fairies. You’re fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn’t a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?”

“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.”

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”

“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

“Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.”

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”