Martin Amis Quotes

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.

If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

And so it's no surprise that people who object to the death penalty on pure moral grounds also think it has no deterrent effect, and people who like the death penalty on grounds of retribution tend to think it has deterrent effects. They like that, and they believe that. I think with climate change we're seeing very much the same thing where those who deny climate change, they don't like that, and they don't believe it.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Why understand when you can believe?

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.