All Michael Shermer Quotes
- The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering. Belief
- Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether. Altogether
- We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as… Anatomy
- Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about… Age
- Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open… Affirmation
- It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain… Ahead
- Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to… Absolutely
- The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech. Addition
- ... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk;… Advocates
- What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool… Blink
- I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what… Actually True
- I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism. Event
- Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief,… All
- Skepticism is not a position; it's a process. Inspirational
- We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage. Bits
- As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become… Abstract
- ...there ... remains a huge following [of Ayn Rand's philosophy] of those who ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies of the founder and focus… Accept
- The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century),… Aquinas
- Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and… Africa
- Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant. Express