Thabo Mbeki Quotes

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

Many teachers seem to believe their opinions are right, and therefore, all other viewpoints are wrong. And they are indoctrinating our children with their beliefs.

We want to have our beliefs, and we want to enforce them on everyone else, but we don't want to have to think about everything that comes along with it.

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

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

One thing about liberals: It doesn't even occur to them that there is another side to an argument. They are so convinced of the righteousness of their own position that it doesn't dawn on them that a reasonable person might have a different viewpoint.

Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.

The trouble with radicals is that they read only radical literature, and the trouble with conservatives is that they don't read anything.

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges ... discussion often leaves off where it should begin.

Where all think alike, none thinks very much.

Most men … can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives

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.

It is a curious foible of a certain type of mind that it is unable to imagine a newspaper editor as one who may, on some public questions, honestly have the same view as that held by other persons.

Sadly, in the highest levels of economic thought in government, questions are not tolerated. It is as if we're dealing with the binary thinking of a fundamentalist religion.

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

Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.

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

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.