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

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

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

Trust, but verify.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

Solutions are not the answer.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

I have to be seen to be believed.

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

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

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.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

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

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

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

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

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

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.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.

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

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

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

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

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

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

The word ‚racism‘ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‚racist.‘

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Information is not knowledge.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people’s opinions.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

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

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

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