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
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We all have our strengths and our failings.
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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.
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I shall always be a priest of love.
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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.
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War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
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I think management and technology all come into play in building a super-yacht. It is a challenge - a serious challenge.
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When you start to see another human being as less than you, it's a danger.
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Sometimes the storyline is as simple as, 'We're just going to be the best, and we're going for the championships.
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Young people who are just starting out somehow need to let you know they know how to sing.
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You always learn something from mistakes.
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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.
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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.
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We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
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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.
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I am very shy with people I don't know.
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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.
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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.
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Sports saved my life.
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If you can hear music, you can hear the musicality of the way someone speaks. It's easier to nail down the way that they talk. So much of it is listening, just like in acting. If you're listening, you pick up the nuance of why a person behaves the way that they behave.
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Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.
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'Bond' was like Christmas: can't wait for it to come around. Being in the films brought me to a global audience, and I have had the opportunity to meet incredible people.
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The knowledge of God, the formation of ideas, the mastery of desire and passion, the distinction between that which is to be chosen and that which is to be rejected, all these man owes to his form...
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.