179 Critical thinking Quotes

Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

To accept capitalism and Free Enterprise as articles of faith without agreeing that we must be free to consider whether what is offered is free and freeing is itself enslavement.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

Mistrust the person who finds everything good, and the person who finds everything evil, and mistrust even more the person who is indifferent to everything.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

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

The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.

The student who would build his knowledge on solid foundations, and proceed by just degrees to the pinnacles of truth, is directed by the great philosopher of France to begin by doubting of his own existence. In like manner, whoever would complete any arduous and intricate enterprise, should, as soon as his imagination can cool after the first blaze of hope, place before his own eyes every possible embarrassment that may retard or defeat him. He should first question the probability of success, and then endeavour to remove the objections that he has raised.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, 'Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you.'

Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. That he is in it is obvious, but why is he outside it? First, because he is not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, that is to say, he has an extraordinary kind of independence of thought and feeling; hence he can have a greater objectivity than the average person has. There are many emotional factors too. And certainly I do not mean to enter here into the complex problem of the revolutionary thinker. But it seems to me essential that in a certain sense he transcends his society. You may say he transcends it because of the new historical developments and possibilities he is aware of, while the majority still think in traditional terms.

When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. (pp. 27-28)

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC.

It's more fun to arrive at a conclusion than to justify it.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

As I argued in Beloved Son, a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions- to anything- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.

To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart.

If two men agree on everything, you can be sure one of them is doing the thinking.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

...that kind of skeptical questioning, don't accept what authority tells you -attitude of science- is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'

You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false

My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.

La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.

'All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.'

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge-theology, philosophy, history, art, science-to see the object as in itself it really is.

Why are they so stupid? Not to know the truth when they hear it? This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.

Fundamentalism is terrifying because it is based purely on emotion, rather than intelligence. It prevents followers from thinking as individuals and about the good of the world.

Recollect your thoughts don't get caught up in the mix/Cause the media is full of dirty tricks

And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise, That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

If you just swallow everything I am telling you, I am brainwashing you.

The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art - Everything is self-evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art - nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.

Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve.

Hume, by his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers-so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again.

In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias.

Discussion: 'Try to keep your mind open to new ideas and never let offense stand in the way of discourse, for discourse and the exchange of ideas is the only motion by which the chaff is separated from the wheat in the world of ideas.'

Education: 'In America, educators punish those who actually think for themselves. There is only acceptance for popular opinion.'

Ignorance: 'Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.'

Education: 'One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.'

Arguments from authority simply do not count; too many authorities have been mistaken too often.

I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.

Till then these sound opinions have taken firm root in you, and you have gained a measure of strength for your security, I counsel you to be cautious in associating with the uninstructed. Else whatever impressions you receive upon the tablets of your mind in the School will day by day melt and disappear, like wax in the sun. Withdraw then somewhere far from the sun, while you have these waxen sentiments. (107)

Lastly, there are Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater, because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.

I can see the sham - but where's the rock?

Some people read because they are too lazy to think.

Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.

C'est meme des hypotheses simples qu'il faut le plus se defier, parce que ce sont celles qui ont le plus de chances de passer inapercues.

Douter de tout ou tout croire, ce sont deux solutions egalement commodes, qui l'une et l'autre nous dispensent de reflechir.

We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.

His insatiable passion for singular odds and ends had a meaning in it; he was groping towards a scientific ordering of phenomena; but the twilight of his age was too confusing, and he could rarely distinguish between a fact and a fantasy.

Because the managerial elites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our educational system, we are actually teaching most people to manage, not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional.

We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed. :-)

Check your assumptions. In fact, check your assumptions at the door.

The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

Probability is a liberal art.

Damn, but they've got us brainwashed, haven't they!

He knew she meant it. Everyone knew she meant it, and everyone knew what she said was true. Everyone had know it for years.

There's a man who came to stay The boy he replaced, disappeared without a trace. Stole all my songs and my style away No-one would say what they wanted to say So he was king for a day. If you sail into the sun Beware the eyes of green And if the whole world tells you 'you are the one' I defy you not to believe them, my son...

The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question 'Is what she says true?'

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.