Thomas Huxley Quotes

No one is served or benefitted by believing in false or faulty ideas.

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

People in general have no notion of the sort and amount of evidence often needed to prove the simplest matter of fact.

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

The line between science and magic becomes blurred so that public judgments on technical issues can be erratic or badly flawed. It frequently appears that some people will believe almost anything. Thus judgments can be manipulated or warped by unscrupulous groups. Distortions or outright falsehoods can come to be accepted as fact.

One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

Humans believe so many lies because we aren't aware. We ignore the truth or we just don't see the truth. When we are educated, we accumulate a lot of knowledge, and all that knowledge is just like a wall of fog that doesn't allow us to perceive the truth, what really is.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.

I get angry when I think that people are blatantly incorrect on matters of fact.

It takes as much time and trouble to pull down a falsehood as to build up a truth.

Modern science's defense against self-delusion relies upon a spirit of open and critical inquiry. This, though hardly infallible, ostensibly uncovers errors and thereby proceeds towards objective truth

If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.

When we are accustomed to use bad reasons for proving natural effects, we are not willing to receive good reasons when they are discovered

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

… people reject the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.

People still believe what they read is necessarily the truth.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

We have to challenge lies. We have to challenge falsehoods and conspiracy theories. If you don't, they fester - unchecked and unchallenged.