Michael Shermer Quotes

Seek truth from facts.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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

Science is true, whether you believe it or not.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

I reject the notion of a post-truth area. I don't believe there is such a thing, and we shouldn't accept that.

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.

Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

Never question the relevance of truth, but always question the truth of relevance.

I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my facts to be in their proper context.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

Conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, take them.

Never confuse wishes with facts.