Thomas Hobbes Quotes

If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

Don't believe everything you read.

Someone once told me to believe 5 percent of what everybody tells you.

Nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it.

It is equally a fault to believe all men or to believe none.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

I think Abraham Lincoln said believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.

Many people operate as though the definition of faith were, Don't ask questions, just believe. They quote Jesus himself, who taught his followers to have the faith of a child (Mark 10:15). But I once heard Francis Schaeffer respond by saying, "Don't you realize how many questions children ask?"

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Believe flatterers and you're lost; believe your enemies and you despair.

A man of good sense always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down.

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

This isn't the old days where you can just say stuff and people will believe it.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

You can't believe everything you read. It's never been more true.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so'.

A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.

Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

Christians are like a thirteen year old kid who still believes in Santa.