George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.

Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things.…It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream-- to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters.

Doubt is important because it suggests progress. Total certainty can mean there's no assessment of things. Doubt, if you don't panic, can allow newness to come in and challenge something that's an established mode.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

Let every man practice the art that he knows best.

I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.

There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.

I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.

The experts or the cynics say, "Oh, those were the good old days, that's when drivers were really drivers. They didn't have all these aids." You know what? What we had, we did the best with and when we got more we provided what was needed.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

If we depart form tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Oft from new truths, and new phrase, new doubts grow, As strange attire aliens the men we know.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

I will spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth.

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.