Michael Shermer Quotes
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Quotes to Explore
-
We all have our strengths and our failings.
-
My dad was in the military, yeah. He was in the Air Force, and he was a doctor, so he would go places for six months here, and two years there. And I was home-schooled because I played the violin, and I did a lot of competitions.
-
I shall always be a priest of love.
-
A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
-
War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
-
I think management and technology all come into play in building a super-yacht. It is a challenge - a serious challenge.
-
Sometimes the storyline is as simple as, 'We're just going to be the best, and we're going for the championships.
-
Young people who are just starting out somehow need to let you know they know how to sing.
-
You always learn something from mistakes.
-
I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.
-
I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.
-
We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
-
I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist.
-
I am very shy with people I don't know.
-
But the worst of all is, according to the old phrase, while the grass grows, the horse starves, but the man of money is the man for Nova Scotia. Those may do extremely well.
-
There is no health without mental health; mental health is too important to be left to the professionals alone, and mental health is everyone's business.
-
Sports saved my life.
-
I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.
-
Individuals can spend their money more wisely, efficiently and more humanely than can government.
-
I come from the golden age of hip hop when all the greats came on the scene.
-
The great thing about it is, in Hollywood, certain people are very good at keeping their lives and who they are very private. I've never met anybody as down to earth and cool in Hollywood than Matt Damon.
-
I think there are plenty of soulmates out there. That's what I choose to believe.
-
Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.
-
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
