Gerald DeGroot Quotes

Belief is a very peculiar thing: we tend to put more store in a belief we like than a fact we hate.

You cannot possibly persuade people that what they have firmly in mind is not so.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy, and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

People are more easily induced to do, and do more easily, what they are already used to; but people also learn to do things new to them.

If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

Debating religious beliefs are a red line, a deep red line.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy.

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

A belief may be larger than a fact.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe - you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

No, I'm not a scientologist.

Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?