Unquestioning Acceptance Quotes

Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it …

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess commitment to some special or constricting idea.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?

Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

When certain people have certain beliefs, they can be unyielding, and that's really what faith is. There's a large place in the world for faith, but when it comes to a scientific, political, and economic issue, dogma is not a very good place to start.

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning.

To accept anything on trust, to preclude critical application and development, is a grievous sin;

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.

I believe anything that anyone tells me. I have found that that is the best way to go through life. When I was younger, I used to be more skeptical, but then I found out that most things were true. So I believe tabloids. I believe legends. I believe anything anyone tells me.

The most positive men are the most credulous.

We use more discriminating intelligence when we buy a used car than when we buy a religion. Buying a used car you at least look underneath the hood, hit the tires, maybe take it to a mechanic to check it out. But in buying a religion you're supposed to wear these narrow blinders, so that if anybody disagrees you can block it out. It's basically, check your brains at the door when you join a religion.

The Proclamation does not, indeed, mark out exactly the course I should myself prefer. But I am ready to take it just as it is written, and to stand by it with all my heart.

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.