Paul Kantner Quotes

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

I'm someone who likes to question things that are put in front of me, I like to think I'm someone who asks 'why sir?' not a 'yes sir.'

I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

That's healthy and good for us that there are people who are prepared to question what we are doing.

Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.

The question is just as important as the answer.

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

That is a good question for you to ask, not a wise question for me to answer.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

I have always been the kid who's asked 'Why?' In my faith, you're just supposed to have faith. But I was always like 'why?'

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

I always prefer other people's interpretations over my own, so I'm not very quick to make explicit what exactly a song or record is about.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts.