I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I’m just a cold-blooded investigator.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

You can’t trust very many people.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

I read the NY Times but I don’t trust all of it.

I purposely don’t talk about money, because people are already skeptical about TV preachers. But I do say that I want you to be blessed. To me, prosperity is having health, having great children, having peace, good relationships. It’s not about the money.

I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.

All in all, I just don’t trust journalists – and I don’t think it’s a good practice for me to trust journalists.

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

Let no such man be trusted.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

People love conspiracy theories.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Young people these days don’t trust anything at all. They want to be free.

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

Seeing is not always believing.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I’m an atheist.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Trust, but verify.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

I don’t believe in icons.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.