Noam Chomsky Quotes

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe - you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning.

I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding.

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

I'm fascinated by the logic that leads to something.

Logic is the key to an all-inclusive spiritual well-being.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.