Barbara Dudley Quotes

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

Complexity and innovation are not always good things.

Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.

We confuse activity with progress, and that's always dangerous, especially in war.

We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

We cannot blindly embrace the benefits of technology.

When any opinion leads to absurdity, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false because it is of dangerous consequence.

Good intentions rarely make good policy.

If you shut up the truth and bury it in the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think.

A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.

Americans see the world as they want it to be rather than the way it is.

Just because something is natural doesn't make it good, and just because something is man-made doesn't make it bad.

Since the mass of mankind are too ignorant or too indolent to think seriously, if majorities are right it is by accident.

Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold.

Nothing hath an uglier Look to us than Reason, when it is not of our side.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

… people reject the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.

What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.

Pollution Prevention, Not Polluter Protection Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.