This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Incredulity is not wisdom, but the worst kind of folly. It is folly, because it causes ignorance and mistake, with all the consequents of these; and it is very bad, as being accompanied with disingenuity, obstinacy, rudeness, uncharitableness, and the like, bad dispositions; from which credulity itself, the other extreme sort of folly, is exempt." - Isaac Barrow
"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the older order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
"What is divine escapes men's notice because of their incredulity." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
"Men can endure to hear otheres praised only so long as they can… persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity." - Pericles NULL
"Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding... Divine faith... is evidently nothing more than incredulity brought under subjection, for we certainly have no other faculty than the understanding by which we can believe; and the objects of faith are not those of the understanding." -
"Faith is deferential incredulity." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophers seeks rather to solve than to deny. " - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"I have obtained... spark discharges extending through more than one hundred feet and carrying currents of one thousand amperes, electromotive forces approximating twenty million volts, chemically active streamers covering areas of several thousand square feet, and electrical disturbances in the natural media surpassing those caused by lightning, in intensity. Whatever the future may bring, the universal application of these great principles is fully assured, though it may be long in coming. With the opening of the first power plant, incredulity will give way to wonderment, and this to ingratitude, as ever before." - Nikola Tesla
"My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn. They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city in America equaled. Call it loyalty, and so it was. It would be a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers. Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi." - Wesley Branch Rickey
"Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL