As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

People should not be in a position where their children have access to weapons and ammunition.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Some of my colleagues argue that by further curtailing our Second Amendment rights, they can enhance public safety. Fine, the burden of proof is on them.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Most Americans think there’s already universal background checks. They don’t understand why there wouldn’t be a background check to purchase a weapon.

There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

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

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.

Facts, like people, want to be free – and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

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

Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States – old as well as new – North as well as South.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Beto’s copy of the Bill of Rights goes from one to three. Mine includes the Second Amendment. But there are a whole host of people here in Washington… they would be happy to confiscate America’s guns. And if you don’t believe that, then you probably also still believe in Bigfoot.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I don’t digest things with my mind.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

Thinking is a wonderful tool if it’s applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you’re dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Guns are bad, I tell you.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Two million felons have tried to buy a gun and, because of the background check, have been denied.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

Facts are not interesting to me.

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.