Thomas Hobbes Quotes

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

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

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true.

One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more;--book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.

You have to tease enough misinformation and lack of information to hopefully make people want more.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

It has become more important than ever that we teach students how to do research, and how to evaluate different sources of information. (Jimmy Wales, IB World, 68, Sept. 2013, p.10. )

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion... Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it... So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?

This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot.

It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.

[Unbelievers] think they have made great efforts to get at the truth when they have spent a few hours in reading some book out of Holy Scripture, and have questioned some cleric about the truths of the faith. After that, they boast that they have searched in books and among men in vain.

Every opinion which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be blended.

Do your homework and keep good files. Know the background and biases of your sources.

With respect to the authority of great names, it should be remembered that he alone deserves to have any weight and influence with posterity, who has shown himself superior to the particular and predominant error of his own times; who, like the peak of Teneriffe, has hailed the intellectual sun before its beams have reached the horizon of common minds.

We have been educated to such a fine - or dull - point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.