Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

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

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

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.

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.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

Everything popular is wrong.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

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.

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.

If you judge, investigate.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

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.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.

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?‘

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

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Solutions are not the answer.

I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

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

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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

My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

My business is to prevent the future.

I think that that’s the wisest thing – to prevent illness before we try to cure something.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

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.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

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.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

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

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

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

I am a normal guy from the Black Forest, and I do not compare myself with the geniuses.

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

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