C. S. Lewis Quotes

People keep asking if I believe in ghosts. If you're talking about poltergeists and weird, supernatural phenomena, not really.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

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.

You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

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.

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.

I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realise it's not a box to begin with.

It is important that students bring a certain …, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

Please don't be deterred in the fanatic application of your sterile logic.

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

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

The 21st century does not like tidy minds.

I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

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.

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.

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 believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.

College is an environment designed to encourage openness - the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.