Tom Lehrer Quotes

I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you're certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have - that certainty is something to be guarded about.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

The sin of certainty leaves no room for the rest of us.

I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.

I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.

What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all.

Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.

The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.