The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

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.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

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

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

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

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

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

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

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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

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

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

Information is not knowledge.

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.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

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

Learn to think continentally.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

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

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

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.

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

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

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

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

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

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

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

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.

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Everything popular is wrong.

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

If you judge, investigate.

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

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

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.

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

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

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?‘

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

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

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.

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

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.

I’m a problem-solver.

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.