Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

One of the first things we should teach every student is not to believe everything they read and hear.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

Learning to fly an airplane taught me a way of thinking, an approach to problem-solving that was applicable and effective. Pilots are very methodical and meticulous, and artists tend not to be.

If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Don’t believe everything the professors tell you. Get your own information on your own terms.

I try to be well informed. I don't know how well I do all the time, but I try nonetheless.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

I prefer my partner to have profound, deep intellect, a profound education, but where their education comes from is no preference of my own.

I've heard everything that anybody can make up or spin, and I know how to cut right through and get to the heart of any issue.

Always make the choice to learn. What Princeton taught me was whatever mess you are studying, pull a thread with great persistence 'til you have clarity of thought. Princeton taught me how to solve a problem. How to think - that's what we pull out of this place.