Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.

Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.

You don't get smarter by not learning stuff.

I don't make decisions with my heart, I use my brain to think things through.

Italians think with their heads.

I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.

The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.

Thinking is the ultimate human resource. Yet we can never be satisfied with our most important skill. No matter how good we become, we should always want to be better

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.