"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. "
— Bertrand Russell

"Doubt everything. Find your own light."
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination."
— Mark Twain

"When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts."
— Michael Ende (The Neverending Story)

"Every man gives his life for what he believes ... one life is all we have to live and we live it according to what we believe."
— Joan of Arc

"You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you."
— CS Lewis

"I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance."
— Adlai Stevenson

"I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world. "
— Margaret Mead

"Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated."
— Ronald Reagan (The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom)

"I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it."
— Hillary Rodham Clinton

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
— Isaac Asimov

"Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death."
— Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"It's one of the great temptations, you see--wanting to prove the strength of your own faith by making others believe what you believe. It shows you're right.
But it doesn't prove anything of the sort. All it proves is that you're condescending and arrogant and good at doing what half-decent actors can do, or advertising agents, or pop stars, or politicians, or con men, or any of the professional persuaders. They sell illusions. And that's all they do. And they feel good when they succeed. That's what their lives depend on.
Which isn't true about religion. Or shouldn't be. Your belief shouldn't depend on what other people think about it. And it certainly should not depend on whether other people believe the same as you."
— Aidan Chambers (N I K Now I Know)

"Spirits live because people believe in them, because if you believe in them, they are real."
— Emma Fan

"If you believe in them, they are real."
— Emma Fan

"People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs."
— Carl Sagan

"Tis with our judgments as our watches: none go just alike, yet each believes his own."
— Alexander Pope

"Piano keys are black and white, but they sound like a million colours in your mind."
— Katie Melua

"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
— James Thurber