Henry Adams Quotes

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

I think it's very important to keep in the back of your mind: 'What if I'm wrong?'

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.

Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.

Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one's own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.

Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.

There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us.

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.