Quotessence
Home / Topics / Credulity Quotes

Credulity Quotes

Browse 167 quotes about Credulity.

Related topics

MenBelieveGullibilityMindSkepticismThinkingIfsKnowsMayAtheismBeliefReligionHumansPeopleAgeMankindVirtueWeakness

Credulity Quotes

“How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.”

DeathFearAtheismLiesAtheistSuperstitionCredulityPious LiesFirst Atheist
Book:Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier
Create image

“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.”

GodDeathReligionBeliefFictionDestinyBibleAgingParadiseCosmosFairy TalesCredulityMythsGullibilityThe BibleVeracity
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
Create image

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”

ReasonTruthLawScienceReligionUniversePoliticsPrinciplesAtheismEnlightenmentIslamStupidityBritainFundamentalismMonarchyNewtonSoulsRevelationCredulityScientistsDarwinRepublicanismCopernicusBritish Monarchy2010GalileoKhalil GibranTuringErnest RutherfordBritish Royal FamilyFrancis CrickHouse Of HanoverJoseph PriestleyBritish ScientistsCharles Prince Of Wales
Author:Christopher Hitchens
Create image

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe 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.”

BeliefSocietyDangerEvidenceHarmTrueActionsInquiryCredulitySavagery
Book:Ethics of Belief and Other Essays
Create image

“{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity} I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at me. I realised something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or I had to declare the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its divines, sages, saints, and martyrs, with successive thousands of believers, age after age, wrong. ...I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of Hell, had become the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of credulity.”

ChurchHellIntegrityShameCatholicUglyCrueltyRealizationCatholicismRitualContemptAgonyLieSubmissionCatholic ChurchLuminousBelieversCredulityChristendomMartyrsSagesDreadfulCoopDivines
Author:H.G. Wells
Create image

“That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.”

BeliefChristianitySacrificeEducatedStoryAbsurdityIndoctrinationCredulityBrainwashingProfaneFableLove Of GodVehemenceExamineEnrapture
Book:The age of reason
Create image

“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.”

BeliefChurchEvidenceAngelMarkMaryLukeMatthewCredulityJohnJosephGospelsImmaculate ConceptionImpostureInconsistenciesBiblical Inconsistencies
Book:The age of reason
Create image

“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.”

ScienceBeliefKnowledgeSkepticismCredulity
Author:Sam Harris
Create image

“deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”

ScienceCultureIgnoranceCriticismDelusionSkepticismSuperstitionCredulityPseudoscienceSkeptics
Book:The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Create image

“The real difference is this: the Christian says that he has knowledge; the Agnostic admits that he has none; and yet the Christian accuses the Agnostic of arrogance, and asks him how he has the impudence to admit the limitations of his mind. To the Agnostic every fact is a torch, and by this light, and this light only, he walks. The Agnostic knows that the testimony of man is not sufficient to establish what is known as the miraculous. We would not believe to-day the testimony of millions to the effect that the dead had been raised. The church itself would be the first to attack such testimony. If we cannot believe those whom we know, why should we believe witnesses who have been dead thousands of years, and about whom we know nothing? The Agnostic takes the ground that human experience is the basis of morality. Consequently, it is of no importance who wrote the gospels, or who vouched or vouches for the genuineness of the miracles. In his scheme of life these things are utterly unimportant. He is satisfied that “the miraculous” is the impossible. He knows that the witnesses were wholly incapable of examining the questions involved, that credulity had possession of their minds, that 'the miraculous' was expected, that it was their daily food.”

LifeMindReasonScienceBeliefKnowledgeAtheismMoralityEthicsEvidenceImportanceAtheistProofLimitationArroganceAgnosticTestimonyMiraclesFactSuperstitionAgnosticismCredulityDefinitionIngersollGospelsAgnostic DefinedChristian Gospels
Book:The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol 1: Lectures
Create image

“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.”

WayMindDifferentTodayLiteratureTomorrowExcellenceMediumsCertaintyMiserableEvolveExcitementAweAnticipationCantOpen MindCredulityScepticism
Author:John Brunner
Create image

“The New Testament rests itself for credulity and testimony on what are called prophecies in the Old Testament, of the person called Jesus Christ; and if there are no such things as prophecies of any such person in the Old Testament, the New Testament.”

IfsPersonsJesusChristJesus ChristProphecyTestamentTestimonyNew TestamentOld TestamentCredulity
Book:The Theological Works ...: The Most Complete Ed. Ever Pub
Create image

“The man who is free from credulity, but knows the uncreated, who has cut all ties, removed all temptations, renounced all desires, he is the greatest of men.”

KnowsMenDesireCuttingHe ManTemptationTiesCredulity
Book:Sacred Books of the East: Including Selections from the Vedic Hymns, Zend-Avesta, Dhammapada, Upanishads, the Koran, and the Life of Buddha
Create image

“All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one.”

HurtAtheismMankindLimitsAmbitionIntellectualMiseryPositive AtheismArtisticClimbsSanityPrudentCredulity
Book:Joseph Conrad’s Sea Tales - Premium Collection: An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, A Smile of Fortune, Typhoon and more: Classics of World Literature from One of the Greatest English Novelists (Including Author’s Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays)
Create image

“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.”

ShouldStillsReasonBodyHumanityChristBornSupportAtheismHolyCrossesDown AndSoldierPositive AtheismMythGhostIgnorantSuperstitionsDiscipleHoly GhostHystericalCredulityGabrielHarlots
Author:John Remsburg
Create image