Jack Reed Quotes

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

We’ve learned our lesson. We are not going to take any more intelligence at face value.

The intelligence community is intended to base its intelligence estimates on facts and analysis—not philosophy and conviction.

I'm the type of person who responds to facts.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

No disrespect, but I don't make decisions based on opinions.

But even the people who don't like my opinions must admit that I always have a reason behind what I say.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Thou shalt not believe something just because you can explain it.

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.

Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.

Practically, Science is true; and Faith is foolish.

[Children] are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

People confuse the word cynicism with the word skepticism. One is “you’re not gonna pay attention to anything, think everything’s screwed up, nothing’s ever gonna work out right”, that’s cynicism. But skepticism is, “you’re presented with evidence and you do your best to draw conclusions based on that”. So, as the saying goes, Bill Nye, do you believe in ghosts? No. However, I would love to see one. Bring it on. I’m open minded to the idea, but the more I look into it in a skeptical frame of thinking, the less likely it seems.