Martha Beck Quotes

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.

It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.

Belief gets in the way of learning.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.

People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments.

It's hard for the majority of people to accept what they don't understand.

People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.

My biggest fear is mindlessly and stupidly repeating myself.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

Political thinking consists in deciding upon the conclusion first and then finding good arguments for it. An open mind is considered irresponsible.

The danger to the state lies not in the intrusion of new thought but in the effort to stubbornly maintain the old state thought.