Top 120 Michael Shermer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

— Michael Shermer

2. “Science is not a thing. It’s a verb. It’s a way of thinking about things. It’s a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.”

— Michael Shermer

3. “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

— Michael Shermer

4. “The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.”

— Michael Shermer

5. “Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.”

— Michael Shermer

6. “A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.”

— Michael Shermer

7. “In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We’re only one God away from total agreement.”

— Michael Shermer

8. “We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.”

— Michael Shermer

9. “Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings – such as astronomical or meteorological events – are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.”

— Michael Shermer

10. “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 who we are, where we came from and where we are going.”

— Michael Shermer

11. “Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”

— Michael Shermer

12. “To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.”

— Michael Shermer

13. “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.”

— Michael Shermer

14. “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 to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.”

— Michael Shermer

15. “Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.”

— Michael Shermer

16. “There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain.”

— Michael Shermer

17. “In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.”

— Michael Shermer

18. “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 geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.”

— Michael Shermer

19. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

— Michael Shermer

20. “Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance.”

— Michael Shermer

21. “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, skepticism, science, is not natural.”

— Michael Shermer

22. “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 dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.”

— Michael Shermer

23. “In science, all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.”

— Michael Shermer

24. “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 we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.”

— Michael Shermer

25. “The fate of the paranormal is to become the normal as our horizons of understanding expand.”

— Michael Shermer

26. “What is the probability that Yahweh is the one true god, and Amon Ra, Aphrodite, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithra, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, Zeus, and the other 986 gods are false gods? As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further.”

— Michael Shermer

27. “Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.”

— Michael Shermer

28. “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.”

— Michael Shermer

29. “Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.”

— Michael Shermer

30. “In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.”

— Michael Shermer

31. “Skepticism is not a position; it’s a process.”

— Michael Shermer

32. “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 mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark.”

— Michael Shermer

33. “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 of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.”

— Michael Shermer

34. “Skepticism is not a position; skepticism is an approach to claims, in the same way that science is not a subject but a method.”

— Michael Shermer

35. “Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.”

— Michael Shermer

36. “The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person. This is based on the philosopher John Rawls’s concepts of the “veil of ignorance” and the “original position” in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making.”

— Michael Shermer

37. “Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.”

— Michael Shermer

38. “Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.”

— Michael Shermer

39. “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”6.”

— Michael Shermer

40. “Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.”

— Michael Shermer

41. “According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness – a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists – there is a convergence of evidence to show the continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species.”

— Michael Shermer

42. “Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.”

— Michael Shermer

43. “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.”

— Michael Shermer

44. “We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don’t want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out.”

— Michael Shermer

45. “The whole point of faith, in fact, is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.”

— Michael Shermer

46. “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 a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.”

— Michael Shermer

47. “Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.”

— Michael Shermer

48. “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

— Michael Shermer

49. “If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.”

— Michael Shermer

50. “Belief change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist, which is affected in part by education but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.”

— Michael Shermer