I really don’t believe in magic.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

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

I think there is a little magic in the fact that I’m so totally real but look so artificial at the same time.

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

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

Science is magic that works.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

I trust Russia and China and Iran and North Korea like I trust a Jussie Smollett police report.

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

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

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?

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.

I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

I don’t believe in colleges and universities.

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

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

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

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

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.

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

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

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

The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

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

Trust, but verify.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

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?

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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.

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

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.

I’m an atheist.

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

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.

I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.

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

I would love to encourage all my teammates to eat the best way they possibly can. High school athletes. Now, that’s not the way our food system in America is set up. It’s very different. They have a food pyramid, and I disagree with that. I disagree with a lot of things that people tell you to do.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

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.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

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.

There’s been some research in cognitive science, I’m told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it’s white noise.

I think I’ve really exhausted the magical. It was a lot of fun, but I’ve put it behind me for the time being.

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

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.