Bret Stephens Quotes

If we learn from those only, of whose lives and opinions we altogether approve, we shall have to turn from many of the highest and profoundest minds.

It's become easy for Americans to live in a cocoon of monolithic ideology and thought. It's time to embrace diversity of thought and diversity of experience.

That process of exposure to diverse opinions isn't 'brainwashing' - it's education.

Allowances can always be made for your friends to disagree with you. Disagreement, vehement disagreement, is healthy. Debate is impossible without it. Evil does not question itself, only hope questions itself. Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken. Infallibility is a sin in any man. All laws can be broken and are. Often. Like when a bumblebee flies or an ancient regime is toppled.

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.

If you want to explore things you haven't explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

And I've always said, 'If two people think the same thing about everything, one of them isn't necessary.' We need to be able to understand that if we're going to make real progress.

I encourage people to find and use the power of their voices just as much when I do not agree with those voices as when I do agree with them.

I'm absolutely not looking for someone who agrees with me about everything or someone who wants to please me by believing what I believe.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

I'm a huge believer in learning anything from multiple points of view.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

I'm a big believer in debate and difference of opinion.

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

If you don't get out of the box you've been raised in, you won't understand how much bigger the world is.

Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.

Instead of silencing speakers on campus, perhaps do what you're supposed to in college instead: listen to someone who thinks differently than you do.

I invite a variety people on my show with wide-ranging opinions - sometimes even my jaw hits the floor, too - but I let them speak. Whether it's left, right, or center, I want to expose my viewers to other perspectives. Agree with them or not, the nation needs to listen.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

You have to hear from people who believe something different from you. That's why you go to college.

University students should rightly be exposed to a plurality of viewpoints as part of their intellectual growth, rather attending the 'flock of sheep association of like-minded individuals.'

If we took information only from sources with which we agreed on all issues, we would be left with merely quoting ourselves, and we would miss a great deal of truth.