Joe Rogan Quotes

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

Nor bigots who but one way see, through blinkers of authority.

The collection of prejudices which is called political philosophy is useful provided that it is not called philosophy.

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it …

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mindset of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

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

Ideology is a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

It is the habit of mediocre minds to condemn all that is beyond their grasp.

There is no man so blind as one who has made up his mind.

I am not an irretrievable skeptic. I am not hopelessly prejudiced. I am perfectly willing to believe, and my mind is wide open; but I have, as yet, to be convinced. I am perfectly willing, but the evidence must be sane and conclusive.

Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers (many have minds made of cabbage) but it can also happen with political ideology. When you're young it's easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you're a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you're doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you're gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It's a big danger.

Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

The man of frank and strong prejudices, far from being a political and social menace and an obstacle in the path of progress, is often a benign character and helpful citizen. The chance is far greater, furthermore, that he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions, or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality. There is such a thing as being so broad you are flat.