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

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.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

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

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

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

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

Let no such man be trusted.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

The most positive men are the most credulous.

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

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.

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.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

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

Seeing is not always believing.

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.

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.

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

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

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

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

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.

Trust, but verify.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

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

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

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

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 really don’t believe in magic.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

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

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

Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

The march of the human mind is slow.

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.

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

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

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?

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

People love conspiracy theories.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

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?

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

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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