John Trudell Quotes

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

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.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.

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.

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.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

I love what I think, and I'm never tempted to believe it.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

I think you need to have a healthy sense of doubt because I think doubt leads to inquiry.

The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.