Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

I love to doubt as well as know.

For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.

It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.

I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.

To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

BOREDOM with established truths is a great enemy of free men.