Unsubstantiated Beliefs Quotes

I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us [...] that faith is a virtue, teaching us that there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence. Once you buy into that, [...] then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith, I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

Imagination … which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions that are not immediately derived from facts ...

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.

General Franks sometimes makes assertions that are wildly inaccurate, but he offers them with great certitude

Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

To have an opinion about somebody you've never met before is pretty superficial.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.

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.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.

Attributing to anything or anyone more good than God has attributed to them is not a positive move, nor does it mean that you have done them any good. A single grain of truth is preferable to a bumper harvest of false imaginings.

He who claims to be sure of something for which there is no evidence is a fool, and he who acts on the basis of what cannot be proved is an imposter.

I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

What shocks me is people who have no expertise championing a view that runs counter to the mainstream scientific consensus.

The less you know, the more you believe.

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.

Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.

The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.

It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.

People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.