Maajid Nawaz Quotes

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

I believe that dogma is often evil.

I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.

... in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult.

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

If all the media are singing one song, it gets dangerous; it really does.

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

… contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which appears to our eyes to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.