Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Demagogues are the mob's lackeys.

in countries where the ability to read and write has been recently acquired or where the people have had no long experience in governing themselves on the basis of their own thinking, it is easy for demagogues to arise and prostitute the mind of the common man to their own base ends

There's never been an era absent of demagogues.

For too long, too many people dependent on Social Security have been cruelly frightened by individuals seeking political gain through demagoguery and outright falsehood, and this must stop.

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.

Political debate is more interested in manipulating the truth, than finding the truth.

When people don't want 'em, when they profit from the division, however, be it politically or financially, that's when I abhor it.

There are surely people in London who would love to play us off against each other. That would be disastrous for the EU.

The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.

It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

It's true that people do assume that people who are critical are smarter than people who are uncritical.

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.

I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.