David Berlinski Quotes

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

... I distrust manifest knowledge.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

He who doubts, knows - knows as much as can be known.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

Science is uncertain.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

If all you have is faith, then you never actually know anything.

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

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.

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.