Questioning Beliefs Quotes

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians. ~ H.G.Wells

Doubt is not an offense. Questioning is a step toward understanding. I am riven by beauty. I am humbled by grace. I strive to be kind, but not because I was told to. ~ Laurie Seidler

The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize. ~ Irene Joliot-Curie

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. ~ Mark Twain

I want you to ask yourself the entire time before you meet me, 'Is this really what I want? ~ Brad McKinniss

She was surprised to feel his hand on her arm and still more surprised-almost unbelieving-to see his fingers unclasp his identification bracelet and remove it from his arm. Silently he fumbled with the bracelet and slipped it around her right wrist. with a tiny click he snapped the clasp shut. Jane gave a gasp of astonishment and turned questioning to Stan. She was wearing his identification bracelet! The silver links on her wrist were still warm from his arm ~ Beverly Cleary

Being a scientist means that you should be able to put your faith to the test, and be willing to surrender it should evidence so require. But it does not mean we have no beliefs. In fact, the very discipline of science is based on the belief that the world is comprehensible, and even more audaciously, that it is mathematically describable. The thing about scientific beliefs is that they are not arbitrary. They're not just random opinions we plucked out of the sky; we came to them through observation and experience, and so far, these beliefs have always been vindicated. ~ Tasneem Zehra Husain

Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories that match their personal beliefs or those of their employers. ~ Lance Morcan

Eradicating the signs of injustice does not eradicate injustice. It hides the fact that humanity can be cruel to each other. They are symbols of a point in time when one segment of society tried to dominate its beliefs over another. ~ Don Rittner

Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death? - no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Pope is questioning my faith. I was very surprised to see it. But I am a Christian, and I'm proud of it. ~ Donald Trump

Dress yourself in such a way that it shows that you love yourself. ~ Debasish Mridha

Not everybody believes in the possibility of political persuasion. Many people see political positions as expressions of innate personality traits - hard-wired into us either by our genes or by an irreversible process of socialization. Why should we waste time trying to be persuasive when people never really change their minds? This is a reasonable concern.

The idea that persuasion doesn't work comes from a bad application of good science. A substantial body of research suggests that our political beliefs are shaped by more or less fixed psychological characteristics ... Research like this, however, tells us about the difficulty of conversion, not persuasion. These are not the same things. We too often misrepresent the task of political persuasion by thinking of the most strident partisan we have ever encountered and imagining what it would take to turn that person into an equally strident partisan for the other side. This sort of Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus conversion rarely happens in politics. Most people don't change their fundamental values, and if we expect them to, we are going to be very disappointed.

But we usually don't need people to change their fundamental values in order to convince them to adopt a particular position. The fact that people have fundamental values makes it possible to persuade them by appealing to those values. But we have to find values that we really share. ~ Michael Austin

In battle, one must adhere to one's beliefs. ~ Azai Nagamasa

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. ~ Michel Houellebecq

If you want to identify me," he says to the British officers who are questioning him, "ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person." page 25 in the book called, "The Man in the Sycamore Tree by Edward Rice ~ Thomas Merton

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil. ~ Georges Bataille

He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, "I no longer believe what I was about to say.") ~ Oliver Sacks

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life. ~ Ralph Fiennes

Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation! ~ Don Feder

Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life. ~ George Eliot

My personal convictions drive me to join those like-minded, in the recruitment of a growing army without guns, no hatred or prejudice, but with a leadership voice of influence and harnessing resources to create the change they desire. The major problems facing the world, particularly our beloved African continent, will not be won by sanctions, cruelty, ethnic cleansing, revenge, guns or bullets. The challenges are not largely externally motivated, so the platform to change them must shift. Shift from selfish to selfless, from external to internal, from behaviours to beliefs. Some of them are externally sponsored but self-inflicted, whilst most of them are due to greed, short-sightedness, abuse and selfishness. ~ Archibald Marwizi

You should never die for your beliefs, because what if you're wrong? ~ Richard Jeni

As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit - to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak - beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them. ~ Carolyn Spring

Magnus placed an order with the room service, who had by now stopped questioning Mr. Bane's unusual needs for things like twenty-four plates of scrambled eggs and "enough coffee to fill one of your larger bathtubs". ~ Cassandra Clare

Self-judgement resides where self-acceptance wishes to be. Our attachment to these negative beliefs and self-judgement can becomes normal what we don't even recognize them as condemnations anymore; we accept them as part of who we are. ~ Miguel Ruiz Jr.

This relationship will help guarantee that, for generations to come, people of all nations will understand my beliefs and my purpose ~ Muhammad Ali

They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The truth does not require anyone believing it (for it to be true; it just is). ~ Arne Klingenberg

Some we proudly display on our arms, while others we shyly conceal. Tattoo the moments of sorrow as well as the moments of splendor and beauty. Tattoo in an acknowledgment and tribute to home, and tattooing your beliefs that define who you are. Whether we intended to or not, every moment of our lives are tattooed to our heart. ~ Forrest Curran

Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects. - Margaret Thatcher. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Shine the light of awareness on your disempowering beliefs and choose to substitute them with empowering beliefs. This way you will choose love over fear and your path to purpose becomes clear. ~ Sharon Kirstin

Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they've become culturally entrenched - once they've become tribal badges of honor - are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people. ~ Joshua D. Greene

It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let the beast in man devour man. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, questions all, and thus, learns and grows. The weak, narrow mind makes its beliefs – whatever form they take – sacrosanct, defending them with violence if necessary. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control or make conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.
They use language in its most evil, twisted form. They appeal to the lowest form of understanding, on a level I hesitate to allow for the term 'human intelligence' to be associated.

Children, fertile minds ripe for molestation. Now they will be taught what to think, not ~ Daniel S. Fletcher

Right now you are creating yourself. Your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions, your decisions, the things you say, the songs you sing, your hopes, your prayers, the things you learn all go into making the person you are, and the person you are to become. Every moment you're in the process of creating a person who is like no other, a life that is special..So go ahead and imagine.. ~ Unknown

Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is - because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs - not just amoral but immoral. ~ Christopher Hitchens

You don't go around questioning the Bible, not if you want to go to Heaven one of these days. Besides, once you start picking holes in things, it's hard to figure out which parts to throw away and which parts to keep. ~ Jenny Wingfield

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. ~ James Baldwin