Bennett Miller Quotes

An outsider's point of view is always handy.

Everybody is smarter from outside of the court.

I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

I think that part of being a good journalist, part of being an awake member of the world you're in, is to view yourself as an outsider, and I always have, to some degree.

I'd like to be known as the person who saw things from a different point of view to others.

An outsider can see some things much better.

For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.

I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Kids don't have ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They're born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught.

I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.

It helps being from somewhere other than Hollywood, not having grown up with that sense of film-making. I really wasn't exposed to that as a young woman.

By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

I believe that people should be able to question things.

I don't want to be married to any ideology, because life is a lot more fluid than that, and I think that we're trained and conditioned in this country to think in teams.

I've never been a guy who has said 'OK' about stuff. That's not me. That's not my personality. If I think something's wrong, I express that.

I was 7 years old, and I challenged everything. I never accepted answers on face value.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.

I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think.

Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics.

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.

To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil.

Men seldom think deeply on subjects in which they have no choice of opinion: they are fearful of encountering obstacles to their faith--as in religion--and so are content with the surface.

My advice to any young person at the beginning of their career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with their fresh, untrained and unprejudiced mind.