Mike McCurry Quotes

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.

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

I owe it to myself and to historic truth to declare that some circumstances … are founded only in conjecture and analogy.

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?

'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.

But is all this true?" said Brutha. Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork." "You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha. "I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it you can see that it is true.

I am unable to rule anything out.

Guessing isn't knowing.

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.

Guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

As you yourself have said, what other explanation can there be?' Poirot stared straight ahead of him. 'That is what I ask myself,' he said. 'That is what I never cease to ask myself.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Those who have to ask if faith is true are opening up a discussion they may not be ready for.

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

The instruments for the quest for Truth are as simple as they are difficult.

Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.

Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

If I fall out, pull this ring? What happens then? I sprout wings and fly?" -Spader in "The Never War

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.