Intellectual Inflexibility Quotes

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.

Mental inertia is death.

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.

There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas.

The minds of some of our statesmen, like the pupil of the human eye, contract themselves the more, the stronger light there is shed upon them.

I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head.

The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.