Quotes about Skepticism

Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can one know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?

If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchistic quietistic pessimism or pessimistic quietistic anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am sceptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.

The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.

Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears.

I think, therefore I doubt.

Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself.