James Burnham Quotes

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

We are set in our ways, bound by our perspectives and stuck in our thinking.

Psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitude which causes a person to cease dreaming, seeing, thinking, and leading.

I think in many ways narrow minded-attitudes lead to extreme thinking.

. . . the fellow's got a bee in his bonnet. Thinks God's a secretion of the liver--all right once in a way, but there's no need to keep on about it. There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

I wish the children could be taught early on that our thinking creates our experience.

I don't ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing 'cos that's just... that's just telling yourself a lie.

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

Man tends to treat all of his opinions as principles.

That's one of the problems with this country: they put you in a box. You're a Republican, you're a Democrat, you're conservative, you're liberal. And that's really unfair.

There is too much acceptance of people saying, 'I am a math person, or I am an artsy person.' It makes me cringe.

My attitude is tattooed that means it's permanent

I think fundamentalism is this radical attitude toward one's own identity and civilization as compared to other people's identities and cultures.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

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 mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it.

It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.

Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them. It's probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.