David Hume Quotes

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision. Always I reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

I can smell bullshit from a mile away but it's so much harder to detect when it's around you all day.

It is difficult to say what truth is, but sometimes it is so easy to recognize a falsehood.

Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

He who knows what he is told must know a lot of things that are not so.

The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.

Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.

The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.

Experience is not the only point, judgment is. And once again, back in 2002, when we both [with Hillary Clinton] looked at the same evidence about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, one of us voted the right way and one of us didn't.

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.

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.

The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition by having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them.

There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.

By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.