Intellectual Courage Quotes

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinion.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

I wouldn’t be Einstein if I kept quiet.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

I always admired Niels Bohr for uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one in the possession of definite truth.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.

If I advance new views in Philosophy or Theology, I cannot expect to have many adherents among minds altogether unprepared for such views; yet it is certain that even those who most fiercely oppose me will recognize the power of my voice if it is not a mere echo; and the very novelty will challenge attention, and at last gain adherents if my views have any real insight.

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. ... It is at the same time a training in boldness. ... It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions

I applaud Chomsky's willingness to take a stand.

If you look for truth, you have to be courageous.

Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.

I contend that the ethos of perpetual non-judgment is intellectually dishonest if not outright cowardly.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

I realized there are no lobbyists for critical thinking, and I realized there are no lobbyists for bravery.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

We need people to point out groupthink - We need people to point out stale, old, dumb thinking - and we sometimes need to do that when it's considered dangerous, strange, or, by some, offensive. And we should be, all of us, trying to protect that. It's really important.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.