The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

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

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

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.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Young love is wild and outrageous, laughing at moderation and blinding us to common sense.

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.

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

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

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

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

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

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

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

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

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

Learn to think continentally.

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

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

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

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

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.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

Solutions are not the answer.

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.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

Information is not knowledge.

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.

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

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

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.

I’m a problem-solver.

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.

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

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

In school, many of us procrastinate and then successfully cram for tests. We get the grades and degrees we need to get the jobs we want, even if we fail to get a good general education.

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.

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

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

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

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

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

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.

In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you’re going to be 20 years from now is how well you’re doing in your education system.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

My biggest skill is common sense. I understand life.

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

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

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

My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.