Top 120 Michael Shermer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.”

— Michael Shermer

52. “Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.”

— Michael Shermer

53. “The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.”

— Michael Shermer

54. “Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.”

— Michael Shermer

55. “We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.”

— Michael Shermer

56. “Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.”

— Michael Shermer

57. “In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.”

— Michael Shermer

58. “The Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing.”

— Michael Shermer

59. “The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.”

— Michael Shermer

60. “For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that ‘to understand all is to forgive all,’ I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because ’to condemn much is to understand.”

— Michael Shermer

61. “Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.”

— Michael Shermer

62. “Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.”

— Michael Shermer

63. “The pie is increasing in size, so everyone gets a bigger slice, but when the rich’s already bigger slice increases in size, the relative amount of wealth accumulates more on the upper end, making the incomes of those in the middle and bottom feel smaller.”

— Michael Shermer

64. “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 schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.”

— Michael Shermer

65. “Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true.”

— Michael Shermer

66. “As the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume colorfully declared toward the end of his classic 1749 work An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

— Michael Shermer

67. “The Age of Reason, then, was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but from original ignorance and dependence on authority and superstition. Never again should we allow ourselves to be the intellectual slaves of those who would bind our minds with the chains of dogma and authority. In its stead we use reason and science as the arbiters of truth and knowledge.”

— Michael Shermer

68. “Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.”

— Michael Shermer

69. “There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.”

— Michael Shermer

70. “There is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God...”

— Michael Shermer

71. “In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. “God works in mysterious ways” will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as “belief in God” or “religiosity” must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity.”

— Michael Shermer

72. “We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.”

— Michael Shermer

73. “Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It’s chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.”

— Michael Shermer

74. “People believe in God because we are pattern-seeking, storytelling, mythmaking, religious, moral animals.”

— Michael Shermer

75. “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

76. “No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.”

— Michael Shermer

77. “One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.”

— Michael Shermer

78. “If I make $100,000 a year and Elon Musk makes $100,000,000 a year and we both see a doubling of our incomes, while I should be thrilled at my newfound fortune of $200,000, if I compare it to Musk’s massive $200,000,000, that comparative difference may feel worse, even though I’m better off and no one is worse off for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s fortune.”

— Michael Shermer

79. “The “hypocrite” is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others.”

— Michael Shermer

80. “So, of course, Gish’s presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said “praise the Lord” and sat back down.”

— Michael Shermer

81. “In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.”

— Michael Shermer

82. “The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.”

— Michael Shermer

83. “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711.”

— Michael Shermer

84. “As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.”

— Michael Shermer

85. “But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.”

— Michael Shermer

86. “I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.”

— Michael Shermer

87. “The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.”

— Michael Shermer

88. “It is no longer acceptable to simply assert your moral beliefs; you have to provide reasons for them, and those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical evidence or else they will likely be ignored or rejected.”

— Michael Shermer

89. “People who espouse Intelligent Design believe nature is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-God. Similarly, liberals believe the economy is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-government.”

— Michael Shermer

90. “When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.”

— Michael Shermer

91. “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.” No squared. The postmodernist belief in the.”

— Michael Shermer

92. “But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.”

— Michael Shermer

93. “Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.”

— Michael Shermer

94. “We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.”

— Michael Shermer

95. “In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’s fairness ethics, but in science as well.”

— Michael Shermer

96. “I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.”

— Michael Shermer

97. “Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined “to hit back” if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.”

— Michael Shermer

98. “Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.”

— Michael Shermer

99. “Of the various tools taught in school, science and thinking skeptically about all claims should be near the top.”

— Michael Shermer

100. “And it wasn’t just astrology. “Religion, astrology and magic all purported to help men with their daily problems by teaching them how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it struck.” With such sweeping power over people, Thomas concludes, “If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.”

— Michael Shermer