Disprove Quotes

With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of "proof" in hand, we can disprove a god's existence in this way: If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. In other words, the absence of evidence - if evidence should be there - is indeed evidence of absence. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

As my colleague, the physical chemist Peter Atkins, puts it, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a teapot in orbrit around the planet Pluto. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't. ~ Richard Dawkins

Hi, Amy, it's mom. Well, by the time you see this, I won't be here anymore, and I know how much that sucks, for both of us. So seeing as how I won't be around to thoroughly annoy you, I thought I would give you a little list of the things that I wish for you. Well, there's the obvious. An education. Family. Friends. And a life that is full of the unexpected. Be sure to make mistakes. Make a lot of them, because there's no better way to learn and to grow, all right? And, um, I want you to spend a lot of time at the ocean, because the ocean forces you to dream, and I insist that you, my girl, be a dreamer. God. I've never really believed in God. In fact, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to disprove that god exists. But I hope that you are able to believe in god, because the thing that I've come to realize, sweetheart... is that it just doesn't matter if god exists or not. The important thing is for you to believe in something, because I promise you that that belief will keep you warm at night, and I want you to feel safe always. And then there's love. I want you to love to the tips of your fingers, and when you find that love, wherever you find it, whoever you choose, don't run away from it. But you don't have to chase after it either. You just be patient, and it'll come to you, I promise, and when you least expect it, like you, like spending the best year of my life with the sweetest and the smartest and the most beautiful baby girl in the world. You don't be afraid, ~ Jen Dawson's Creek

I am a child of God, therefore I don't have to be afraid or dismayed. I know God is with me. He will strengthen me, help me, and uphold me with His hand (Isa. 41:10). I am a child of God, therefore no weapon formed against me shall succeed. God will disprove every tongue that rises against me in judgment (Isa. 54:17 ESV). I am a child of God, therefore God is in my midst, a mighty one who will save me; He will rejoice over me with gladness; He will quiet me with his love; He will exult over me with loud singing (Zeph. 3:17). I am a child of God, therefore God's Word is there for me. It is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (Ps. 119:105). ~ Lysa TerKeurst

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved. ~ Roger Scruton

Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist. These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions. ~ Winston S. Churchill

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory. ~ Michio Kaku

Hell,huh? Well,hopefully we'll be able to disprove that theory soon.Besides, if it were hell,would I be here with you?"
"I don't know,if hell called for an eternity of annoyance instead of torment,maybe."
"I like you more every day.But neither of us qualifies for hell. We're victims." He smiled, the last word laced with venom. "And if we're occasionally wicked,well, certainly we'd be justified."
i wondered if he was trying to comfort me about Vivian,but he stared into the distance as though anticipating future wickedness. What did he want me to light on fire this time? I didn't think I was up for more destruction. ~ Kiersten White

Steve Paikin : Can you imagine evolution being unproved someday ?
Jerry A. Coyne : It's possible, there are some facts that could disprove evolution, for example if I dug down into rocks say.. a billion years old and found a fossil of human or a fossil of rabbit and you did that and you were certain enough that these rocks were old, that would completely overthrow darwinism but the fact is, you know, over a 150 years of digging we haven't found a fossil out of place.
[Evolution and Religion - Paul Nelson vs. Jerry Coyne/Denis Lamoureux, 16m40] ~ Jerry A. Coyne

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. ~ Jo Walton

I'm always looking to disprove what I think I know for sure. I call that learning. ~ Greg Saunier

It's specifically this Z = 2^(Aleph0) that he couldn't prove. Ever. Despite years of unimaginable doodling. Whether it's what unhinged him or not is an unanswerable question, but it is true that his inability to prove the C.H. caused Cantor pain for the rest of his life; he considered it his great failure. This too, in hindsight, is sad, because professional mathematicians now know exactly why G. Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the C.H. The reasons are deep and important and go corrosively to the root of axiomatic set theory's formal Consistency, in rather the same way that K. Godel's Incompleteness proofs deracinate all math as a formal system. Once again, the issues here can be only sketched or synopsized (although this time Godel is directly involved, so the whole thing is probably fleshed out in the Great Discoveries Series' Godel booklet). ~ David Foster Wallace

The existence of a single atheist does not disprove the existence of God. ~ William F. DeVault

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. ~ Richard Dawkins

And we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that. ~ Richard Dawkins

Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them. ~ Galileo Galilei

Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. ~ John Fowles

You need something more than just the scientific method to explain the world in which we live. Beware of false dichotomies (either/or situations) that proponents of scientism assume. You should never have to choose whether or not you believe in either a plane's engine or gravity. You can have both. You shouldn't have to accept the existence of Steve Jobs or the iPhone; nor should you have to decide whether you believe in God or science. Those who insist that scientific discoveries disprove God are mistaken. ~ Jon Morrison

But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it. ~ Richard Dawkins

But," say you, "I am full of sin." "Ay," say I, "but that sin has been laid on Christ." "Oh," say you, "but I sin daily." "Ay," say I, "but that sin was laid on him before you committed it, years ago. It is not yours; Christ has taken it away once for all. You are a righteous man by faith, and God will not forsake the righteous nor will he cast away the innocent." I say, then, the child of God may have his faith at a low ebb; he may lose the light of his Father's countenance, and he may even get into thorough despair; but yet all these cannot disprove my text - "He that believeth is not condemned. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There is a school of thought that believes that sleep is for the night. You appear to be out to disprove them. ~ Alan Ayckbourn

The kind of knowledge which is supported only by observations and is not yet proved must be carefully distinguished from the truth; it is gained by induction, as we usually say. Yet we have seen cases in which mere induction led to error. Therefore, we should take great care not to accept as true such properties of the numbers which we have discovered by observation and which are supported by induction alone. Indeed, we should use such a discovery as an opportunity to investigate more exactly the properties discovered and to prove or disprove them; in both cases we may learn something useful. ~ Leonhard Euler

The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose - and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it it not going to last forever. ~ Barbara Smoker

Darwin uneasily accepted that evolution might occasionally proceed a little faster than he had at first envisaged, but in general he simply dismissed Thompson's claim; although he could not disprove it, he remained stubbornly convinced that he was right. Darwin felt that evolution change, like Lyell's geological forces, must proceed at a respectable pace; apart from anything else, more rapid change hinted at supernatural, perhaps even divine, intervention in the Earth's history - approaches that increasingly had no place in properly philosophical explanations. ~ Jim Endersby

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. ~ Bertrand Russell

When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question? ~ Ravi Zacharias

I don't love any of my old boyfriends anymore. I'm not sure I ever did, and I'm not sure if at the time I thought I was sure. My mother says that's normal, that men are proud of every one of their conquests, and women wish they could forget it all. She says that's an essential gender difference, and I can't say I disprove her theory. What keeps me from full revulsion, from wanting the sexual equivalent of an annulment, is thinking about what I got from each one that I still hold on to now. ~ Lena Dunham

I was thinking that I might fly today. Just to disprove all the things you say ... please be careful with me, I'm sensitive, and I'd like to stay that way. ~ Jewel

Zach shoveled another spoonful of Fruit Loops cereal with milk into his mouth. "It is not possible!"
"How do you know? Just because there's no proof to prove it, there's no proof to disprove it either."
"You're trying to make me crazy, aren't you?"
"Not at all." Sara put her bowl down. "I'm just saying there could be bunny shifters."
"There are no bunny shifters!"
Shaking her head she accused, "You're a bunny bigot."
Zach threw his spoon back in the near-empty bowl. "And there is no such thing as bunny bigots. ~ Shelly Laurenston

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked. ~ David Gross

When religion ceases to be speculative and becomes factual and "true", it will become science. Science can be used to prove or disprove opinions, beliefs and accusations. Until any religion crosses that line, who is anyone to use their religion to judge others? ~ Christina Engela

Some would argue that aggressive displays of sexuality by black female performers such as Nicki Minaj and Beyonce are empowering precisely because of historical perceptions of female sexuality and black women's sexuality in America. The idea that women cannot be overt about their sexuality is rooted in sexist notions of female purity. The idea that black women must prove their worth and disprove centuries of propaganda against their sexuality is buying into racism and sexism and making the oppressed responsible for adapting to oppression - instead of demanding that society stop treating women's sexual desires differently from those of men. ~ Tamara Winfrey Harris

When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I'm not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it's talking about us behind our backs. ~ Douglas Coupland

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is. ~ Alain De Botton

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing. ~ Richard Dawkins

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy. ~ Richard Dawkins

No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option. ~ Peter Kreeft

It is the author's opinion that all the scriptures, including the Book of Mormon, will remain in the realm of faith. Science will not be able to prove or disprove holy writ. However, enough plausible evidence will come forth to prevent scoffers from having a field day, but not enough to remove the requirement of faith. Believers must be patient during such unfolding.4 ~ Robert L. Millet

Prophets often foretold destruction and sometimes the destruction did not come, yet this did not disprove their divine mission, as in the case of Jonah. For God is gracious, and ready to turn away his wrath from those who turn away from their sins. But the prophet who prophesied peace and prosperity absolutely and unconditionally without adding the necessary proviso, that they do not by willful sin put a bar in their own door and stop the coming of God's favors, will be proved a true prophet only by the accomplishment of his prediction. ~ Matthew Henry

The problem is that the pressure to disprove a stereotype changes what you are about in a situation. It gives you an additional task. In addition to learning new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking in a schooling situation, or in addition to trying to perform well in a workplace like the women in the high-tech firms, you are also trying to slay a ghost in the room, the negative stereotype and its allegation about you and your group. You are multitasking, and because the stakes involved are high--survival and success versus failure in an area that is important to you--this multitasking is stressful and distracting.

...And when you realize that this stressful experience is probably a chronic feature of the stetting for you, it can be difficult for you to stay in the setting, to sustain your motivation to succeed there. Disproving a stereotype is a Sisyphean task; something you have to do over and over again as long as your are in the domain where the stereotype applies. Jeff seemed to feel this way about Berkeley, that he couldn't find a place there where he could be seen as belonging. When men drop out of quantitative majors in college, it is usually because they have bad grades. But when women drop out of quantitative majors in college it usually has nothing to do with their grades. The culprit, in their case, is not their quantitative skills but, more likely, the prospect of living a significant portion of their lives in a domain where they may forever have t ~ Claude M. Steele

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so ... ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation. ~ John M. Penkal

The belief in God, is not a matter of common sense or logic or argument, but of feeling. it is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea . ~ W. Somerset Maugham

There is no quarrel between science and spirituality. I often hear people of science trying to use it to prove the nonexistence of the spiritual, but I simply can't see a chasm in between the two. What is spiritual produces what is scientific and when science is used to disprove the spiritual, it's always done with the intent to do so; a personal contempt. As a result, scientists today only prove their inferiority to the great founding fathers of the sciences who were practitioners of alchemy. Today's science is washed-out and scrubbed-down and robbed of everything mystical and spiritual, a knowledge born of contempt and discontent. Or perhaps, there are a few who wish to keep those secrets to themselves and serve everyone else up with a tasteless version of science and the idiots of today blindly follow their equally blind leaders. ~ C. JoyBell C.

To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent. She can't wait to disprove it. ~ Cary Grant

Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence. ~ Francis Collins

When I think about it like that, it feels like a burden. But that won't mean I'll be single for the rest of my life - I hope. I feel very settled with myself in my world. I don't feel as needy and desperate to prove things about myself. In my twenties I was very keen to achieve this and disprove this and that. Now I enjoy just being able to concentrate on my children and my work and myself. ~ Jude Law

You can't prove any hypothesis, you can only improve or disprove it. ~ Christopher Monckton

A man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life. ~ Plato

Religion is a theory about everything that needs to be proved only after death; those who prove or disprove it never come back to us to tell the story ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. ~ Bertrand Russell

You should not put too much trust in any unproved conjecture, even if it has been propounded by a great authority, even if it has been propounded by yourself. You should try to prove it or disprove it ... ~ George Polya

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. ~ Carl Sagan

Incidentally, when we're faced with a "prove or disprove," we're usually better off trying first to disprove with a counterexample, for two reasons: A disproof is potentially easier (we need just one counterexample); and nitpicking arouses our creative juices. Even if the given assertion is true, our search for a counterexample often leads to a proof, as soon as we see why a counterexample is impossible. Besides, it's healthy to be skeptical. ~ Ronald Graham

A theist can't empirically prove that God exists but he believes in God because no one can allegedly disprove God's existence. By his logic, you must believe in anything you can't disprove. That means all things are real until disproved
including the tooth fairy, the Loch Ness Monster, Santa Claus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. ~ G.M. Jackson

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either. ~ Christopher Hitchens

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one! ~ George Eliot

The claim that science can disprove God's existence is an honest ambition but it is a statement that is actually impossible to back up. This is because the task of proving something like science is unprovable by scientific methods. How do you prove an idea like "science"? What container do you use to measure it? What laws of science do you use to prove science? That's the first reason why the worldview of scientism, the belief that science proves everything, fails to work out in real life. Science cannot prove everything because it cannot even prove itself. ~ Jon Morrison

Whatever proponents of false memory syndrome may claim and however persuasively they tell their stories and anecdotes, dissociative amnesia typically involves fragmented recall of trauma and is rather a retrieval inhibition than a forgetting (Spiegel et al., 2011). It may also involve complete loss of recall for sexual and physical abuse but most commonly, dissociative amnesia is partial, variable, and coexists with memories of trauma (Dalenberg et al., 2014). Studies addressing the accuracy of recovered abuse memories show that these memories are no less accurate than continuous memories for abuse (Scheflin & Brown, 1996). Memory is reconsolidated each time it is accessed and therefore potentially distorted (Bridge & Paller, 2012).
Evidently, this does not disprove the possibility that some clinicians are too suggestive, one way or another, pushing their patients to adopt views that serve to confirm the therapist's own perspective and beliefs. ~ Jenny Ann Ryberg

The effects of conformity on beliefs and attitudes are the more injurious because people tend to associate with others who have similar beliefs to themselves. ... the only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it. But because like mixes with like, people are rarely exposed to counter-arguments to their more deeply held convictions, let alone to counter-evidence. Their beliefs conform to those of their associates: hence, there is little possibility of eliminating persistent errors. ~ Stuart Sutherland

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. ~ Bertrand Russell

This quarrel over the messianic status of Jesus within first-century Judaism had profound effects on Christianity and prompted it towards a fateful turning point that switched the emphasis from following the way of Jesus to believing things about Jesus. Gradually a Christian came to be thought of not as one who lives and acts in a certain way, but as one who holds certain convictions or theories. The trouble with religious convictions or beliefs is that, since we can rarely prove or disprove them, we get anxious about them and start quarrelling with people whose convictions or theories differ from our own. ~ Richard Holloway

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother. ~ Henry Louis Gates

Apparently, the people in the [George W.] Bush administration who wanted to confront me on this could not spell my name correctly. They wanted to send a series of emails thinking that perhaps MSNBC was perhaps favorable to the Bush administration. They thought that they could send me a series of questions or talking points to disprove Joe Wilson with. ~ Keith Olbermann

The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1. ~ Erwin Chargaff

I Use The Square To Begin My Solutions Because The Square Is A Non-choice, Really. In The Course Of Development, I Search For The Forces That Would Disprove The Square ... ~ Louis Kahn

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. ~ Carl Sagan

If you can't think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn't scientific. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

When people say they are atheists they don't mean they can't prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it's impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don't positively know there are no gods, just as we can't prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can't prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don't exist. There's a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove. ~ Richard Dawkins

Interestingly enough, every time I corner a fanatic with scientific facts which they cannot argue or disprove, they either dismiss me as 'anti-God' and a 'secular humanist' or they start spouting reams of misapplied and irrelevant 'scripture' at me, like good little sheeple and like that will in any way, shape or form prove anything... Which just proves to me that common sense and actual reason doesn't come into it. Only hatred. ~ Christina Engela

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Even if evolution were true, it wouldn't disprove God. God has performed more spectacular feats than evolution. It's not even a daunting challenge to a belief in God. If you want something that complicates a belief in God, try coming to terms with Michael Moore being one of God's special creatures. ~ Ann Coulter

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something. ~ Kary Mullis

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it. ~ Michael Shermer

The belief of God is not a matter of common sense, or logic, or argument, but of feeling. It is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from. Yet I can imagine that at some future date I may believe in God; but it will be as now, when I don't believe in Him, not a matter of reasoning or of observation, but only of feeling. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

One may take the line that metaphorical devices are inevitable in the early stages of any science and that although we may look with amusement today upon the "essences," "forces," "phlogistons," and "ethers," of the science of yesterday, these nevertheless were essential to the historical process. It would be difficult to prove or disprove this. However, if we have learned anything about the nature of scientific thinking, if mathematical and logical researches have improved our capacity to represent and analyze empirical data, it is possible that we can avoid some of the mistakes of adolescence. Whether Freud could have done so is past demonstrating, but whether we need similar constructs in the future prosecution of a science of behavior is a question worth considering. ~ B.F. Skinner

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients' texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions. ~ Mark S. Smith

This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody's mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that's getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a notion. ~ Aldous Huxley

It must be conceded that a theory has an important advantage if its basic concepts and fundamental hypotheses are 'close to experience,' and greater confidence in such a theory is certainly justified. There is less danger of going completely astray, particularly since it takes so much less time and effort to disprove such theories by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of our knowledge increases, we must give up this advantage in our quest for logical simplicity in the foundations of physical theory ... ~ Albert Einstein

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. ~ William James

I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove. ~ Gloria Steinem

The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead. ~ Marya Hornbacher

The religious man will constantly look for the proof of Heaven and Hell; while the atheist man will constantly look to disprove Heaven and Hell. And they go on like that, locked-head in battle, both battling for beliefs that really cannot be proven. Neither the existence nor the non-existence of Heaven and Hell can be proven. And soon they will all be dead. And nobody will know where they go to, except they themselves who die. And so the battle continues, as it always has. And why should I join either side? If there is a God Almighty, I should imagine Him not needing human beings made out of carbon to believe in Him. What use to God would our species be? If He loves us, then He will love us because He chooses to love us. Never because He needs us to believe in Him. It wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, to an Almighty God, if carbon species breathing oxygen believed in Him or not. If He wanted to love the species then He just would. Regardless of their own persuasions. And if there is not an Almighty God, then it would not matter if I joined such a battle, either. Either way, why would I join such a cursed downward spiral? The truth that we do know for sure, is that it is our responsibility and it is in our best interest, to live our lives in such a way that creates Heaven on Earth and puts Hell on Earth far away. ~ C. JoyBell C.

But we don't correct for the difference in science, medicine, and mathematics, for the same reasons we didn't pay attention to iatrogenics. We are suckers for the sophisticated. In institutional research, one can selectively report facts that confirm one's story, without revealing facts that disprove it or don't apply to it - so the public perception of science is biased into believing in the necessity of the highly conceptualized, crisp, and purified Harvardized methods. And statistical research tends to be marred with this one-sidedness. Another reason one should trust the disconfirmatory more than the confirmatory. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Negative stereotypes about our identities hover in the air around us. When we are in situations to which these stereotypes are relevant, we understand that we could be judged or treated in terms of them. If we are invested in what we're doing, we get worried; we try to disprove the stereotype or avoid confirming it. We present ourselves in counter-stereotypical ways. We avoid situations where we have to contend with this pressure. It's not all-determining, but it persistently, often beneath our awareness, organizes our actions and choices, our lives - like how far we walk down the aisle of an airplane to find a seat, or how well we do on a round of golf, or on an IQ test. We think of ourselves as autonomous individuals. After all, we make choices. But we often forget that we make choices within contexts, always. And pressure tied to our social identities is a component of these contexts. This is difficult to appreciate by reflecting on our experience. And yet, as I've have urged throughout this book, it is precisely these pressures that make a social identity real for us.

Stereotype threat is a broad fact of life. ~ Claude M. Steele

People who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions. ~ Tom Clancy

Atheists say no one can prove the existence of God but I say no one can disprove that God exists I see God in everything I feel his presence everywhere to me I know that he exists. ~ Shane Harper

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own. ~ Jeanette Winterson

No one will presumably ever be able to prove or disprove such fundamental religious principles as the existence of God. ~ Stephen Kinzer

An angry discussion followed, during which belligerent ministers, who had come to the convention in an attempt to disrupt it, read aloud passages from the Bible to disprove Antoinette Brown's contention of equality. They read passages like "Let your women be silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience," and "Likewise, ye wives, be in subection to your own husbands. ~ Miriam Gurko

Statistics can't measure equal opportunity, just equal results. The government starts with the assumption that if, say, employment rates diverge from population makeup by more than one-fifth, it's the employer's obligation to disprove the presumption of illegal discrimination. In other words, the feds' message is: Impose quotas upon yourselves or expect to pay a fortune in legal fees. ~ Steve Sailer

...[Emilio] felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art. ~ John Connolly

Fundamentalists didn't try to disprove science. They didn't argue against it. They pronounced against it! It was the equivalent of a parent clinching an argument with a child by shouting: 'because I say so'. That's what fundamentalist religion does. It refutes not by evidence but by authority. Why is Darwin wrong? Because the Bible says so! But they did more than pontificate. They tried to ban science itself. That's ~ Richard Holloway

I mean by the universe, the aggregate of all things that have being in themselves; and so do all men else. And because God has a being, it follows that he is either the whole universe, or part of it. Nor does his Lordship go about to disprove it, but only seems to wonder at it. ~ Thomas Hobbes

A week went by and nothing. But eventually, as they always will, the rumors reached me. And everyone knows you can't disprove a rumor. ~ Jay Asher

She is like a mathematical equation, always there and impossible to disprove. ~ Jeanette Winterson

If it will reassure you that I'm not a coward, I suppose I could rearrange his face." Quietly he added, "The music has ended," and for the first time Elizabeth realized they were no longer waltzing but were only swaying lightly together. With no other excuse to stand in his arms, Elizabeth tried to ignore her disappointment and step back, but just then the musicians began another melody, and their bodies began to move together in perfect time to the music.
"Since I've already deprived you of your escort for the outing to the village tomorrow," he said after a minute, "would you consider an alternative?"
Her heart soared, because she thought he was going to offer to escort her himself. Again he read her thoughts, but his words were dampening.
"I cannot escort you there," he said flatly.
Her smile faded. "Why not?"
"Don't be a henwit. Being seen in my company is hardly the sort of thing to enhance a debutante's reputation."
Her mind whirled, trying to tally some sort of balance sheet that would disprove his claim. After all, he was a favorite of the Duke of Hammund's…but while the duke was considered a great matrimonial prize, his reputation as a libertine and rake made mamas fear him as much as they coveted him as a son-in-law. On the other hand, Charise Dumont was considered perfectly respectable by the ton, and so this country gathering was above reproach. Except it wasn't, according to Lord Howard. "Is that why you refused to dance with me when ~ Judith McNaught