Unthinking Obedience Quotes

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

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

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 mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.

Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

Be blind. Be stupid. Be British. Be careful.

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

It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.

Some one has said that most of us don't think, we just occasionally rearrange our prejudices.

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

Record companies, they're just like lemmings.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.