Michael Shermer Quotes

97 quotes in 1487 categories

• The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.
• People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.
• Play hard, work hard, love hard. . . .The bottom line for me is to live life to the fullest in the here-and-now instead of…
• As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the…
• Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body…
• Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
• The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).
• Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a…
• Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.
• Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
• Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
• The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September…
• Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design…
• Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism…
• Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
• I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.
• My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human…
• We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having…
• The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
• No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a…

Browse Michael Shermer Quotes by Category