E. F. Schumacher Quotes

Faith is a poison that paralyzes the mind. In all the days of your life, seek knowledge!

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.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

There have to be people who are vocal about the advancement of knowledge over faith.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Great intellects are skeptical.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.

[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.

Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason

In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.

I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.