Don Marquis Quotes

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

Every dogma has its day.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess commitment to some special or constricting idea.

We tend to believe our own propaganda a little too completely.

Do not believe just because you want to believe.

I'm always having a crisis of faith, with everything. People who are certain are terrifying to me. That's how religious wars get started.

What information you see doesn't dictate what you think or believe. I think it's crazy to think that.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

I can think of nothing worse than a think-tank where everybody agreed.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.