Words matter. These are the best William Kingdon Clifford Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
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.
To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.
The rule which should guide us in such cases is simple and obvious enough: that the aggregate testimony of our neighbours is subject to the same conditions as the testimony of any one of them.
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.
Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.
