John Rae Quotes

Notwithstanding this high Ecclesiastical authority, he who dared accept truth only because it could be proved, or proved to be good, and disregard authority, was commonly stigmatized as an infidel.

An objective truth and individual reason are feared above all.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

Organized religion provides a model of the way all organizations, from the state down to the village garden club, end a price in terms of a member's freedom of thought and action.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

Where there is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

When hearing something unusual, do not preemptively reject it, for that would be folly. Indeed, horrible things may be true, and familiar and praised things may prove to be lies. Truth is truth unto itself, not because people say it is.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

One cannot escape dogmas—those who hold most firmly to dogmas today are those whose only dogma is that dogmas should be feared like the plague.

The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Answers given with authority negate the search for truth.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.

Custom and authority are no sure evidence of truth.