<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Know thyself.</em></p>
traditionally attributed to
<p><em>Now, of the four divisions which we have made of the essential idea of moral goodness, the first, consisting in the knowledge of truth, touches human nature most closely. </em></p>
On Duties (1:5(18))
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. … If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. </em></p>
Atlas Shrugged, pp. 1017-1018, in a speech by John Galt
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything. I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no; and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates. </em></p>
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (4:19:14), p. 676
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To conjecture about something is to measure its probability. The Art of Conjecturing or the Stochastic Art is therefore defined as the art of measuring as exactly as possible the probabilities of things so that in our judgments and actions we can always choose to follow that which seems to be better, more satisfactory, safer and more considered. </em></p>
Ars Conjectandi, as quoted in Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game, p. 106
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because another person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven. </em></p>
letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. </em></p>
letter to Judge John Tyler, 1804
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.</em></p>
letter to Reverend James Smith, December 8, 1822
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all</em></p><p><em>Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.</em></p>
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favorable conditions—a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect … “Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest. — It is easy to see what by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world: —“sin.” This concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests … Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer ... And he must suffer so much he is always in need of a priest … I repeat that sin, man’s self-destruction par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible.</em></p>
The Anti-Christ (49), pp. 82-83
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Science is not constituted by any particular body of subject-matter. It is constituted by a method, a method of changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry ... The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified. </em></p>
A Common Faith (2), pp. 38-39
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The danger to society [of believing without sufficient evidence] is not merely that it should believe the wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery ... To sum up; it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” </em></p>
“The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and other Essays, pp. 76-77
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. </em></p>
attributed to, as quoted by Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief, p. 148
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. </em></p>
“Blindness”
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been, “Truth,” but the maintenance of a certain type of society, the inculcation in the young and refreshment in the old of an approved “system of sentiments” upon which the local institutions and government can depend. </em></p>
The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (7:6), p. 378
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.</em></p>
as quoted in Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief, p. 306
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I make a stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong.</em></p>
"Holy Wars,” Skeptical Inquirer 25, No. 5 (September/October 2001)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light … Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. </em></p>
taken from his lecture on Newton presented at the Royal Society’s Newton Tercentenary Celebration, 1947
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The ability to think critically is not hardwired into our brains, nor is it simply an accumulation of common sense that develops as we grow up. Critical thinking involves a deliberative application of concepts developed across centuries of intellectual history, such as deductive and inductive logic, avoidance of logical fallacies, and consideration of base rates and control groups. Critical thinking also requires a willingness to favor reason over emotion and to suspend judgment and live with ambiguity when the evidence is weak, confusing, or beyond our ken. In the absence of critical thinking, we leave ourselves reliant on the easy interpretations that grow out of direct experience and the anecdotal accounts of others, interpretations which are all too vulnerable to error and delusion.</em></p>
“Science and Racism,” Skeptical Briefs 17, No. 4 (December 2007), p. 10
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. </em></p>
(Attributed to), as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 286
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.</em></p>
letter to Frederick William, November 28, 1770 from Ferney
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. </em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 295
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise … without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things that are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. </em></p>
letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The heart has its reasons that reason does not know. </em></p>
Pensées (4:277), p. 222, in the original French, “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas.”
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