Intellectual Integrity Quotes

If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

Without intellectual honesty, you can't have a culture that's willing to tolerate failure because people cling too much to an idea that likely will be bad or isn't working and they feel like their reputation is tied up in it. They can't admit failure.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.

Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion.

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.

I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.

A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

We have a high moral responsibility to be rational

One of our most solemn obligations is to state the truth as we see it and to refuse to allow any of our courses to become instruments of propaganda. The world has seen the dreadful consequences of Aryan History instead of history, and of Communist Genetics instead of genetics. Courses whose primary purposes are political or racial indoctrination have no place in our educational system—no matter who demands them or what noble purposes they seem to serve.

The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.

The truth is out there, but it’s often discomfiting and nuanced and hard to find, and not nearly as satisfying as believing whatever you want and mocking those who don’t.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

Don't cater to stupidity.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?