Michael Shermer Quotes

Science is the only true guide in life.

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myth.

Generally, TED speakers are believers in the scientific method.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, comically, they only wriggle about inside.

Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

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.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.