It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

I’m a problem-solver.

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

I’m actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn’t believe that, about other possibilities?

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

We can’t have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That’s crazy. You can’t have more types of fake news than real news. That’s allowing public deception to go unchecked. That’s crazy.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

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

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Don’t say I hate institutionalised religion – rather than saying I hate those things, which I do not, what I’m saying is that perhaps there is a way of opening more doors, rather than closing so many.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Information is not knowledge.

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

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

Let the path be open to talent.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.