Jay Griffiths Quotes

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

The Church burned Bruno and imprisoned Galileo. The Church has lived by its monopolies and conquered by its intolerance.

I don't think I'm as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don't think I'm not as revolutionary as Galileo.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

Conformists die, but heretics live forever.

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

I think there's always a call for people who are bucking the norm.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind.

I recall that I had a terrible struggle finding anything antireligious in the school libraries.But many years later my family moved into a house where a woman had left a box of books containing 20 volumes on the history of the Inquisition. I found out there was a word for people like me: "heretic." I was kind of delighted to find I had an identity.

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed with them because, again, I don't care too much what other people think.

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

Don't be anybody's follower, be a student.

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

I have been judged vehemently suspect of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the sun in the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the earth is not at the center of same, and that it does move. Wishing however, to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. (Quoted in Shea and Artigas 194)

It would be positively boring if minds were in tune.

After Galileo was convicted (for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition) for his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun, ... he replied, 'Still, the Earth is moving.'

No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.