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.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‚What is the scientific status of the claims?‘ ‚What social or ideological needs do they serve?‘

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.

Religion is just mind control.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

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

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

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.

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.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

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

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Solutions are not the answer.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

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.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

I read the NY Times but I don’t trust all of it.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

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.

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.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

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

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

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

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

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

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

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

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

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.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

I like to be creative.

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

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

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

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.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

I’m a painter in sound.