In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

Mary Roach
About This Quote

The most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become. This is a good one to use as a response to someone who doesn't want to understand or admit that they might be wrong. You can say something like, “In my experience, the most steadfastly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realties of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.”

Source: Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. <span style="margin:15px;... - Neil Gaiman
  2. I’m a fake fact factory. The things I make are the things I make up. Also, as a side business, I make love. Actually, I just made that up. - Dora J. Arod
  3. The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. - E.m. Forster
  4. Sometimes, some lies that spoken with high confidencecould be more receptive than facts that spoken with doubt. - Toba Beta
  5. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved... - Thomas Henry Huxley
More Quotes By Mary Roach
  1. It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family...
  2. As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father, " though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets, " "I would have sold my wife and...
  3. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.
  4. Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.
  5. It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that–the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel...
Related Topics