Peter Thiel Quotes

If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

In high school, I came to realize I had a second-hand faith, derived from my parents and family background. I had no actual reasons for believing it.

Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.

Religion may indeed inspire acts of great kindness and courage. But it also trains people to believe things for which there is no evidence. This makes religion's intrusion into the political sphere all the more troubling.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being.

Why understand when you can believe?

Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you've got to believe to be a good sound Christian.

Be sure to choose what you believe and why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

We must contemplate what the meaning of being "educated" is. Some people think a person with plenty of degrees is an educated one. But I believe a person who can judge a situation correctly and make timely decisions is more important.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.

If you believe that you will believe anything.

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

Stand up for what you believe in, because you can fall for anything.

Once the people begin to reason, all is lost