Challenging Beliefs Quotes

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

Asking the questions - that's what changes lives. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry. And you cannot believe the old thoughts again.

People do not like to have their favorite myths of idols challenged and as a rule I think that the public does not like bad news.

'Preacher' really appeals to my iconoclastic nature because I'm a student of comparative world religions since my early 20s, so I love shows that really challenge what you think about all these things. I think it's genius. I was so excited there was a role I could play on it.

I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.

I'm about challenging people. Like, properly challenging them and their assumptions.

A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.

Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. 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 the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

Dialogue can be a very dangerous pastime, for it may force us to give up some of our most cherished caricatures—and these die hard.

Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.

There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

I'm totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I'm looking to have my views challenged. I'm looking to be corrected.

The risk a lot of times, in my mind - and I may be incorrect - the risk of challenging people directly with their beliefs is that society is such that there's too many of us, so a direct challenge automatically engages people's defenses.

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

Society sometimes discovers facts that society has a hard time getting used to.

I can criticize your religion all I want, and you can criticize mine. I don't like this whole climate of, 'You can't ever say anything bad about the group I'm in, cause every group is untouchable.' We can all criticize each other and engage in debate all we want.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.