Skeptical View Quotes

[Read] anything but history,.. for history must be false.

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Someone once said a cynic is just a disappointed romantic. That really, really sums me up.

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.

I fear your faith has been mis- placed—but then, faith usually is.

I think one reason my books have found mainstream success is that they're written from a skeptical point of view.

As for our gods, we have a few too many to be true.

No truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.

To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.

The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute; if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth.

The God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

The most extraordinary of all the things called miracles, related in the New Testament, is that of the devil flying away with Jesus Christ, and carrying him to the top of a high mountain; and to the top of the highest pinnacle of the temple, and showing him and promising to him all the kingdoms of the world . How happened it that he did not discover America? or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any interest.

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.

Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

My own view on religion is . . . It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and . . . to chronicle eclipses . . . These two services I am prepared to acknowledge.

I'm not a big believer in man-made climate change.

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent.