The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell

Man (and Woman) is a credulous animal and must believe something – in the absence of good grounds for belief, he (and she) will be satisfied with bad ones. Bertrand Russell

What a more critical mind might recognise as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality Carl Sagan The Demon Haunted World

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away Philip K Dick

Our main guiding principle must always be doubt. Conviction however is a powerful agent continually preying on our emotions and encouraging us to discount evidence that unsettles us.

By doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth Peter Abelard 1122 Preface to “Yes and No”

It may seem odd that a system of knowledge based on doubt could have been the driving force in constructing modern civilisation John Cornforth (Aust J Chem ) also

The Relativity of Wrong When people thought the Earth was flat they were wrong. When people thought it was round they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is round is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat then your view is more wrong than both of them put together Isaac Asimov

It will be difficult to reach a positive conclusion in these matters unless they be frequently discussed. It is by no means fruitless to be doubtful on particular points Aristotle

Hume’s Maxim No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle (or anything extraordinary), unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous (or extraordinary) than that which it endeavours to establish. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1758

Intellectual Integrity Intellectual integrity - the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive Bertrand Russell 1957

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka I found it!”, but “That’s funny…” Isaac Asimov

Probably nothing - about science - disturbs non-scientists more than the seemingly dogmatic rejection of claims of the paranormal. But science is not rejecting the claims so much as the evidence used to support them Alan Comer

The Royal Society did consider the motto “Quantum nescimus” “What a lot we don’t know”

The Royal Society chose: “Nullius in verba” “We take nobody’s word for it“

Even if a billion people believe a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing Anatole France (x20)

This seems simple to us today but was pretty daring at the time Lester Little American Academy Rome

By Science I mean knowledge pure and simple with no limits and thus I mean an understanding of everything

In this sense Science is truly independent of race, colour or creed and thus the only international, humanitarian and democratic philosophy

Scientific advances are only fully accepted when the recipe is published so that the experiments can be repeated and the results unequivocally confirmed.

A lie will travel half way round the world while the truth is putting its shoes on. Mark Twain

The most common of follies is the belief passionately in the palpably untrue H L Mencken