Uncritical Thinking Quotes

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope.

No people do as much harm as those who go about doing good.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

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.

Be careful of hubris about ideas—especially your own. Remember always, that there is one commonality between all the good ideas that were ever created and all the bad ideas: The people you created them thought that they were good ideas.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.