Quotes about Unfounded Beliefs

Mark Twain

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Josh Billings

The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.

Ayn Rand

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

George Orwell

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

Voltaire

Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

William Ruckelshaus

Why argue about things you can't prove?

Baruch Spinoza

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.

Spinoza was one of the most feared intellectuals in human history—feared, that is, by the established power structures. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims.

George Santayana

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Leon Panetta

I don't engage in hypotheticals.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

All sweeping assertions are erroneous.

Bill Ayers

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

Samantha Power

Ignorance and prejudice make for bad advisers.

Bertrand Russell

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

In politics, the most frequent examples are conspiracy theories and economic and/or political principles that are derived from ideology with little or mothing real from which to provide a deducible justification. An explanation that seems not to be contradicted is not an explanation that could be called true unless there is some evidence to support it, not a lack of evidence to refute it. There are millions of propositions in the world for which there is no evidence to reject them, but that does not make them true." 3rd Earl Russell of Kingston

Bell Hooks

Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.