English - Mathematician | May 4, 1845 - March 3, 1879
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.
William Kingdon Clifford
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No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
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This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
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The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
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We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.
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To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts.
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Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
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An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
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When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.
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Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.
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He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.
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