Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

My life is my argument.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, ‚You don’t know how to use the English language,‘ or ‚How could you make that argument?‘ It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

I wasn’t very good in academics, but I could have been if I could have studied well. I was a smart kid.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

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

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

I think I’m pretty smart. I think I’m pretty clever. But there’s a lot that you hone in on when you finish your education.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.

Learn to think continentally.

The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on. And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Intelligent people should learn from their experiences. With people on the street, the bad experience has beaten them.

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

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.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

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

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else’s shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

If you look at the movie ‚Belly,‘ I identify with Sincere the most. I am a gangster. I love my lady to death. I’m not in the game for the wrong reasons. I’m not in the game for the glory. I’m in the game to survive so the people that I love could be straight. I’m a highly intelligent individual.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

In the ’50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

Law is mind without reason.

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

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

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.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.