Here's a few from a web site I just recently joined, healthyskepticism.org :
"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
- Mark Twain
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
- Buddha
“Another error is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients; the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The Proficience and Advancement of Learning
(London, 1605).
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
- Mark Twain
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
- Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and educator, Aphorisms and Reflections, 1907
Never ascribe to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
True courage is mixed with circumspection, the kind of healthy skepticism that asks, “Is this the best way to do this?” True cowardice is marked by chronic skepticism, which always says, “It can’t be done.”
-William Bennett
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
- Jacob Bronowski, scientist, broadcaster, The Ascent of Man, 1973
