Edith Hamilton Quotes

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.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

I feel passionately about how I express myself. Language is the greatest motivating force. You can phrase something positively and inspire people to do their best, or negatively and make them feel worried, uncertain, and self-conscious. You can talk at a fast pace and people will get nervous, feel afraid to bring up extraneous thoughts. But those are the very thoughts that might be most important! They might represent that person's best thinking. If you're rushed, you're simply not going to get at that extra level of thinking.

People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

People calculate too much and think too little.

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.

Thinking clearly and effectively is the greatest asset of any human being. We are constantly reminded that the one superiority that man has over other animals is the ability to think. It is primarily our ability to think that sets us apart from other animals.

I hate to tell people what they should think 'cause I really have an aversion when people tell me what to think.

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

I think intellectualization is what's killing most people.

So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.

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

We don't read other people's opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don't think so. Don't condemn them. Any fool can do that. Try to understand them. Only wise, tolerant, exceptional people even try to do that.

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.

Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.