Scott Adams Quotes

Believe half of what you see and only some of what you hear, unless you hear it from me.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment

You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.

Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.

I want to explore for myself and keep an open mind. There is a stigma of being a flat earther and if I'm going to do it I want to know the facts.

You can say the Earth is flat, but it doesn't mean you're going to fall off the edge.

Dilbert: You joined the "Flat Earth Society?" Dogbert: I believe the earth must be flat. There is no good evidence to support the so-called "round earth theory." Dilbert: I think Christopher Columbus would disagree. Dogbert: How convenient that your best witness is dead.

If some of these [Republican] folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the 'flat earth society.' They would not believe that the world was round.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

Now that she decided she knew exactly what she wanted –him- she couldn’t wait to break the news. And if he didn’t want her, she could live with that – what she wouldn’t be able to live with was if she never told him.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you.

[Creationists have] lost in the courts of law; they've long ago lost in the halls of science; and they continue to lose with every new piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left.

Nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.

...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.

I have been too long acquainted with human nature to have great regard for human testimony; and a very great degree of probability, supported by various concurrent circumstances, conspiring in one point, will have much greater weight with me, than human testimony upon oath, or even upon honour; both of which I have frequently seen considerably warped by private views.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

Just because you see an iceberg does not mean that there isn't global warming.

As the Japanese Zen masters say, “Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions”. Drop your theories; don't seek the truth.

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

When you cannot answer a skeptic, be content to wait for more light; but never forsake a great principle.

I don't lie." "You don't lie," I repeated. "That's what I said." "Ever." "Nope." Sure you don't, I thought.