Credulity Quotes

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Quotes About Credulity

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Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale") ~ John Berwick Harwood
Credulity quotes by John Berwick Harwood
Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate is that of party-spirit; of men, who, being numbered, they know not why, in any party, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favor those whom they profess to follow. ~ Samuel Johnson
Credulity quotes by Samuel Johnson
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin. ~ H.L. Mencken
Credulity quotes by H.L. Mencken
I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery that falsehood and malice can invent, or the credulity a deluded population can swallow. ~ William Murray, 1st Earl Of Mansfield
Credulity quotes by William Murray, 1st Earl Of Mansfield
If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. ~ Lyall Watson
Credulity quotes by Lyall Watson
A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. ~ H.L. Mencken
Credulity quotes by H.L. Mencken
Too much doubt is better than too much credulity. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
Credulity quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll
It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between. ~ Paul Davies
Credulity quotes by Paul Davies
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things. ~ Walt Whitman
Credulity quotes by Walt Whitman
There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker. ~ Max Lerner
Credulity quotes by Max Lerner
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Credulity quotes by George Bernard Shaw
Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.

Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea's parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God's intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety. ~ Jeffrey Tayler
Credulity quotes by Jeffrey Tayler
One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism.
- Shaw's Preface ~ George Bernard Shaw
Credulity quotes by George Bernard Shaw
Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. ~ Richard Dawkins
Credulity quotes by Richard Dawkins
We all know that a lie needs no other grounds, than the invention of the liar; and to take for granted as truth, all that is alleged against the fame of others, is a species of credulity, that men would blush at on any other subject. ~ Jane Porter
Credulity quotes by Jane Porter
There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par. ~ Mark Twain
Credulity quotes by Mark Twain
Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Credulity quotes by Thomas Jefferson
As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm.
'You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man.' She narrowed her eyes and shivered. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
Credulity quotes by F Scott Fitzgerald
The New Age movement looks like a mixed bag. I see much in it that seems good: It's optimistic; it's enthusiastic; it has the capacity for belief. On the debit side, I think one needs to distinguish between belief and credulity. ~ Huston Smith
Credulity quotes by Huston Smith
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? ~ Christopher Hitchens
Credulity quotes by Christopher Hitchens
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. ~ Charles Lamb
Credulity quotes by Charles Lamb
Despoilers obey the Malthusian law; they multiply with the means of existence, and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes. ~ Frederic Bastiat
Credulity quotes by Frederic Bastiat
There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. ~ Eric Hoffer
Credulity quotes by Eric Hoffer
This touches on the issue of how vegans should handle the caveman argument. Many of us are tempted to strain credulity and torture the evidence to 'prove' humans are 'naturally' vegan. This is a trap, and one into which carnists (especially paleo-dieters) would love us to fall; the evidence isn't on our side. There's no doubt that hominids ate meat.... The argument for veganism has always been primarily ethical, and ought to remain that way. It's based on a concern for the future, not an obsession about the past. ~ Jack Norris
Credulity quotes by Jack Norris
We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. ~ Terence McKenna
Credulity quotes by Terence McKenna
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. ~ Christopher Hitchens
Credulity quotes by Christopher Hitchens
There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
Credulity quotes by Arthur Conan Doyle
It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism. ~ Nanamoli Thera
Credulity quotes by Nanamoli Thera
As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind. ~ John Brunner
Credulity quotes by John Brunner
As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are thought not only acceptable but redeeming ― even necessary. ~ Sam Harris
Credulity quotes by Sam Harris
A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. ~ William E. Gladstone
Credulity quotes by William E. Gladstone
In fact, world-renowned British writer and philosopher
Malcolm Muggeridge, who was an atheist defending evolution
for some 60 years, but who subsequently realized
the truth, reveals the position in which the theory of evolution
would find itself in the near future in these terms:
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially
the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of
the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity
will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis
could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it
has. ~ Harun Yahya
Credulity quotes by Harun Yahya
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
Credulity quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge
The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity ... It's the limit case for likelihood. ~ Terence McKenna
Credulity quotes by Terence McKenna
Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows? ~ John Dos Passos
Credulity quotes by John Dos Passos
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Credulity quotes by George Bernard Shaw
A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
Credulity quotes by Elizabeth Gaskell
The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Credulity quotes by Thomas Jefferson
There is an Is. That is as much monkish credulity as St. Thomas asks of us at the start. Very few unbelievers start by asking us to believe so little. And yet, upon this sharp pin-point of reality, he rears by long logical processes that have never really been successfully overthrown, the whole cosmic system of Christendom. ~ G.K. Chesterton
Credulity quotes by G.K. Chesterton
Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth ... The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism. ~ Lydia M. Child
Credulity quotes by Lydia M. Child
In the past, we had objects to believe in - objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, ... Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information. ~ Jean Baudrillard
Credulity quotes by Jean Baudrillard
The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey. ~ H.L. Mencken
Credulity quotes by H.L. Mencken
I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything." "You don't want to do anything?" "I want to sleep." -Gloria Gilbert

"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: "'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. "'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Credulity quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. ~ George Orwell
Credulity quotes by George Orwell
The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think. ~ Julius Caesar
Credulity quotes by Julius Caesar
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises - from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics - seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.
[The folly of scientism] ~ Austin L. Hughes
Credulity quotes by Austin L. Hughes
And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart's content.
"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see. ~ Charles Dickens
Credulity quotes by Charles Dickens
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
Credulity quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
There was something about Gawain's youth and credulity that was driving me to puncture his pious innocence. ~ Bernard Cornwell
Credulity quotes by Bernard Cornwell
The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
Credulity quotes by Charles Caleb Colton
Credulity is the sister of innocence ... ~ Fanny Burney
Credulity quotes by Fanny Burney
People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity. ~ Tacitus
Credulity quotes by Tacitus
Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows--and that is saying a good deal. ~ Agatha Christie
Credulity quotes by Agatha Christie
The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody. ~ Agnes Repplier
Credulity quotes by Agnes Repplier
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. ~ Sigmund Freud
Credulity quotes by Sigmund Freud
Everywhere I turn I see it - credulity being exploited, and men of practical judgment, watching the game and seeing through it, made hard in their attitude of materialism. How ~ Upton Sinclair
Credulity quotes by Upton Sinclair
When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect. ~ Joseph Joubert
Credulity quotes by Joseph Joubert
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Credulity quotes by George Bernard Shaw
When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence. ~ Thomas Paine
Credulity quotes by Thomas Paine
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
Credulity quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge
If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. ~ Paul Johnson
Credulity quotes by Paul Johnson
The magician depends for the success of his art upon the credulity of the people. Whatever mystifies, excites curiosity; whatever in turn baffles this curiosity, works the marvelous. ~ Alexander Herrmann
Credulity quotes by Alexander Herrmann
Women suffer more from disappointment than men, because they have more of faith and are naturally more credulous. ~ Margaret Of Valois
Credulity quotes by Margaret Of Valois
There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are ~ Samuel Johnson
Credulity quotes by Samuel Johnson
Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Credulity quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich. ~ Stephen Bayley
Credulity quotes by Stephen Bayley
The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
Credulity quotes by Robert Green Ingersoll
It strains credulity to suggest that an agency charged with gathering intelligence affecting the national security does not have an 'intelligence interest' in drone strikes, even if that agency does not operate the drones itself. ~ Merrick Garland
Credulity quotes by Merrick Garland
[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions! ~ Adam Sedgwick
Credulity quotes by Adam Sedgwick
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. ~ Barbara G. Walker
Credulity quotes by Barbara G. Walker
That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. ~ Umberto Eco
Credulity quotes by Umberto Eco
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. ~ Samuel Johnson
Credulity quotes by Samuel Johnson
Credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red ~ Lev Grossman
Credulity quotes by Lev Grossman
In this metropolis a number of lurking leeches infamously gain subsistence by practicing on the credulity of women. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
Credulity quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism
a Mongoloid metaphysic. ~ Edward Abbey
Credulity quotes by Edward Abbey
Because religious training means credulity training, churches should not be surprised to find that so many of their congregations accept astrology as readily as theology, or a channeled Atlantean priest as readily as a biblical prophet. ~ Barbara G. Walker
Credulity quotes by Barbara G. Walker
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. ~ William Kingdon Clifford
Credulity quotes by William Kingdon Clifford
Doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct ~ Kathryn Schulz
Credulity quotes by Kathryn Schulz
No preacher would deliberately judge the credibility of his message by the credulity of his audience. But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy. That ~ Ronald Knox
Credulity quotes by Ronald Knox
We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields. ~ Ernst Cassirer
Credulity quotes by Ernst Cassirer
From the 18th to the 20th Century it was the boast that human thought had at least come out of the dark woods of medieval superstition, credulity and obscurantism, into the sunshine of clear thinking where the dry breezes of skepticism blow unhindered. 'Fell the trees and level the hills that still obscure the view; let the winds drive off the mist' - they said. But now that much of this work has been accomplished it is beginning to be felt that there is no shade in all these flat plains of perpetual parching wind and sunshine, and through this desert no flooding Nile flows. There are those who, secretly, would like, if they could, to reconstruct the dim, wet, haunted woods before they die of thirst. ~ Nanamoli Thera
Credulity quotes by Nanamoli Thera
Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages. ~ Samuel Johnson
Credulity quotes by Samuel Johnson
No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. Thus it happens that human knowledge, as we have it, is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which we at first imbibed. ~ Francis Bacon
Credulity quotes by Francis Bacon
Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Credulity quotes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
Credulity quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. However ~ Sam Harris
Credulity quotes by Sam Harris
Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity. ~ William Hazlitt
Credulity quotes by William Hazlitt
Radical skepticism is no more critical than is credulity. ~ Craig A. Evans
Credulity quotes by Craig A. Evans
The Christ is a myth. The Holy Ghost Priestcraft overshadowed the harlot Superstition; this Christ was born; and the Joseph of humanity, beguiled by the Gabriel of credulity, was induced to support the family. But the soldiers of Reason have crucified the illegitimate impostor, he is dead; and the ignorant disciples and hysterical women who still linger about the cross should take his body down and bury it. ~ John Remsburg
Credulity quotes by John Remsburg
To the child, the savage, and the Wall Street operator everything seems possible, hence their credulity. ~ Eric Hoffer
Credulity quotes by Eric Hoffer
A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism. ~ Eric Hoffer
Credulity quotes by Eric Hoffer
The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void. ~ Terence McKenna
Credulity quotes by Terence McKenna
These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything ... It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility. ~ Robertson Davies
Credulity quotes by Robertson Davies
credulity and superstition are close friends ~ Frederick Marryat
Credulity quotes by Frederick Marryat
To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right. ~ William E. Gladstone
Credulity quotes by William E. Gladstone
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. ~ Anonymous
Credulity quotes by Anonymous
We believe easily what we fear of what we desire ~ Jean De La Fontaine
Credulity quotes by Jean De La Fontaine
Both the fanatical believers and the fixed attitude people are loud in their scorn of what they call "woolly minds." ... [But it] is the woolly mind that combines scepticism about everything with credulity about everything. Being woolly it has no hard edges. It is easy, pliant, yet it has its own toughness. Because it bends, it does not break. ... The woolly mind realizes that we live in an unimaginable gigantic, complicated, mysterious universe. To try to stuff the vast bewildering creation into a few neat pigeon-holes is absurd. We don't know enough, and to pretend we do is mere intellectual conceit. ... The best we can do is keep looking out for clues, for anything that will light us a step or two in the dark. ~ J.B. Priestley
Credulity quotes by J.B. Priestley
The story of the angel announcing what the church calls the immaculate conception, is not so much as mentioned in the books ascribed to Mark, and John; and is differently related in Matthew and Luke. The former says the angel, appeared to Joseph; the latter says, it was to Mary; but either Joseph or Mary was the worst evidence that could have been thought of; for it was others that should have testified for them, and not they for themselves. Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we to believe the same thing of another girl whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where? How strange and inconsistent is it, that the same circumstance that would weaken the belief even of a probable story, should be given as a motive for believing this one, that has upon the face of it every token of absolute impossibility and imposture. ~ Thomas Paine
Credulity quotes by Thomas Paine
The only disadvantage of an honest heart is credulity. ~ Philip Sidney
Credulity quotes by Philip Sidney
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