Intellectual Rigidity Quotes

If you go into an academic institution with a clean slate, you are very likely to come out a liberal. That is a huge problem.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.

Very few of the so-called liberals are open-minded.... They shout you down and won't let you speak if you disagree with them.

There are some people as obtuse in recognizing an argument as they are in appreciating wit. You couldn't drive it into their heads with a hammer.

The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

I think that a lot of people in all walks of life have the impression, of course, that, 'I specialize in something. I can't - I don't have the time to read other things. I'll just go to pure entertainment when I'm relaxing, and then I'll come back to my pure specialty.' That produces - that attitude produces idiot savants, unfortunately.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.

I've known Dennis Kucinich for a long time, and I don't think I have illusions about him. Sometimes I find him pompous, male chauvinistic, intellectually unbending. But he is a good man, and a serious one.

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.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Pedantry is the dotage of knowledge.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.