Unquestioned Beliefs 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.

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

Nothing hath an uglier Look to us than Reason, when it is not of our side.

Why should we not teach our children those principles, upon which we ourselves have thought and acted? Ought we to instill into their tender minds a theory, especially if unfounded, which is contradictory to our own practice, built on the most solid foundation? Why should we reduce them to the cruel dilemma of condemning, either those principles which they have been taught to believe, or those persons whom they have been taught to revere?

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

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.

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.

… people reject the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It's like having a black belt in white privilege.

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

The public never knows what he wants, but he always wants what he knows.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

Piety is oppressive. It takes all the air out of thought.

Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.

Growing up in America is like being taught to be stupid.

The belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.

There is a sect in this country, which extends its influence, more or less, into all the ramifications of society, that explodes all kinds of knowledge not founded on personal experience; which inculcates that ignorance is the summum bonum; that the less one reads the more one thinks, and that the less he understands, the better he can act; that education beyond the precincts of common schools is allied to aristocracy, and incompatible with natural equality

Majorities are no less exposed to error and frustration than kings and dictators. That a fact is deemed true by the majority does not prove its truth.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.