“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“It is in everyone’s best interest to realize and remember that the default human way is to believe first and ask questions never. We become better thinkers by recognizing how poor we are at thinking.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

“If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

“A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

Ted Chiang (1967) American science fiction writer

“We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

“We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.”

Desmond Morris (1928) English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter

“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions…. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

“And that’s the question we all must answer -- what kind of Europe, what kind of America, what kind of world will we leave behind. And I believe that if we hold firm to our principles, and are willing to back our beliefs with courage and resolve, then hope will ultimately overcome fear, and freedom will continue to triumph over tyranny -- because that is what forever stirs in the human heart.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America