John C. Wright Quotes

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth.

Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

I am not an adolescent, nor a romantic. I analyze objectively.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.

One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

Conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, take them.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.

No disrespect, but I don't make decisions based on opinions.

For dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

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

For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.