critical thinking quotes

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

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.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

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

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m a problem-solver.

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

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.

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

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

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.

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.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

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

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.

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.

Solutions are not the answer.

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

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

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.

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