Michael Shermer Quotes

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural …. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

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

I have learned that it is just as well to avoid even the appearance of something which you prefer not to have published as a fact! So many things are published as facts in any case which have no foundation in them whatsoever, that I don't suppose it really matters! For fair minded people usually wait until they verify a statement before they believe it, and those who believe it without verification are the ones who want to believe it!

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.

If you hear an old parable and you don't believe it, it's mythology. If you hear an old parable and you believe it, it's religion.

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

In some aspects of alternative medicine we are fighting an almost medieval belief in magic but debunking such beliefs is like telling people that the tooth fairy is sniffing glue.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

Instead of assuming everything you're being told is the truth, ask plenty of questions.