I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I’ve never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.

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

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

I don’t believe in colleges and universities.

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?

You can’t trust very many people.

You are twice as likely to be struck by lightning as you around to be affected by a terrorist event in the United States.

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.

If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

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

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

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

I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

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

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.

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

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

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

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.

Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

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

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

Out of 6 billion humans, the troublemakers are just a handful.

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

Seeing is not always believing.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

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

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

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

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.

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 don’t pay a lot of attention to polls.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

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’m as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes – and I will dare to say to you that I don’t think of myself as a celebrity per se.

Because the Internet is so new, we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the Web.

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

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.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

I have trust issues with allowing other individuals to know my innermost secrets for fear of how I may be viewed. Everyone has this.

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

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

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

I don’t believe in icons.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

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

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

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?

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