Voltaire Quotes

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

Learn to do your own thinking - don’t let other people do it for you!

Determine to do some thinking for yourself. Don't live entirely upon the thoughts of others. Don't be an automaton.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

I've always had better luck learning things on my own. And I really love the challenge of doing it yourself and kind of being alone against the system.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

If we don't empower ourselves with knowledge, then we're gonna be led down a garden path.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Think for yourself and question authority.

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

There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

We must help the child to act for himself, will for himself, think for himself; this is the art of those who aspire to serve the spirit.

No one tells me what to think. I think for me.

Self-reliance leads to intellectual independence. Each man must think for himself, must train the mind to think, must habituate the soul to observe and analyze.

Learn to depend upon yourself by doing things in accordance with your own way of thinking.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.