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Credulity

state of willingness to believe in one or many people or things in the absence of reasonable proof or knowledge

Credulity is a state of willingness to believe in one or many people or things in the absence of reasonable proof or knowledge. Credulity is not simply belief in something that may be false. The subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.

Illustration by Peter Newell for the poem "The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven" (Fables for the Frivolous) by Guy Wetmore Carryl.
One man received a thought and accepted it without examination. Another received a thought and tested its truth. Which of them acted with greater reverence? ~ Marcus Eremita

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B

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What is history, after all, but the record of the periodical crusades for or against some bogey which believing men have evolved out of their credulity and fear?
  • What is history, after all, but the record of the periodical crusades for or against some bogey which believing men have evolved out of their credulity and fear?
    • Ernest Boyd in: Raymond Woodbury Pence Essays of Today, Macmillan, 1935, p. 94

C

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  • 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. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. 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.
 
The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity. ~ Carl Clinton Van Doren

D

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  • There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

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I

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J

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Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength - Charles Lamb.
  • There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are to be avoided, and so many present gratifications obtained, by craft and delusion that very few of those who are much entangled in life have spirit and constancy sufficient to support in the steady practice of open veracity.

L

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  • The history of credulity would be the most singular page in the great history of mankind. From those vast beliefs which have founded religions and empires, down to the inventions that garnish the last new murder, there has always been a tendency in the human mind to believe with as little expense of the reasoning faculty as possible.
    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon in 'The Female Portrait Gallery. No.5. Miss Wardour.', published 1841 in Literary Remains, by Laman Blanchard.

M

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  • One man received a thought and accepted it without examination. Another received a thought and tested its truth. Which of them acted with greater reverence?
  • How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.
 
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has. - Malcolm Muggeridge.
  • One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

N

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R

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S

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  • The raising of storms by witches is attested by so many, that I think it needless to recite them. The theologian Meric Casaubon argued – in his 1668 book Of "Credulity and Incredulity", that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.
  • The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it's all bleakly barren.

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V

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If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. ~ Lyall Watson
  • If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. Compared to them, we are primitive, hanging on to a stubborn, unspecialised, five-fingered state, clever but destructive. They are models of refinement, nature’s archangels, the oldest and largest land mammals, touchstones to our imagination

W

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See also

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Wikipedia
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Wiktionary
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