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

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

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

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

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.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

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

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

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

Law is mind without reason.

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

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

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.

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

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

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.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

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.

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

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

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

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

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.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

If you judge, investigate.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

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.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

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.

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

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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.

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

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

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.

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

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.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

Information is not knowledge.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

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

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.

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

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.