Stefan Molyneux Quotes

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship. The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists.

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

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

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!'

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it.

Subjectivism is not an absolute principle; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sound methodology.

Conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, take them.

The truth is always the strongest argument.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.