Anais Nin Quotes

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

I don't think that anyone should think for you. And that's exactly what cults do. All cults, including Scientology, say, "I am your mind, I am your brain. I've done all the work for you, I've laid the path open for you. All you have to do is turn your mind off and walk down the path I have created.

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

Sadly, in the highest levels of economic thought in government, questions are not tolerated. It is as if we're dealing with the binary thinking of a fundamentalist religion.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

One thing about liberals: It doesn't even occur to them that there is another side to an argument. They are so convinced of the righteousness of their own position that it doesn't dawn on them that a reasonable person might have a different viewpoint.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself. You're taught not to think too deeply about things.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that where ever others differ from them it is so far error.

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.

We want to have our beliefs, and we want to enforce them on everyone else, but we don't want to have to think about everything that comes along with it.

Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.