Emma Donoghue Quotes

I only know what I read in the papers.

I like information. I love when smart people make me think of something in a new way.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled.

For sure, the American people have access to more information now than any other people who have ever lived on earth. And I think we do a pretty good job of sorting out what's important.

My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion - namely, that I myself could not think at all.

I've always been a ravenous consumer of opinion. When I was in my high school library and my college library, I would read 'National Review' and I would read 'The Nation' and I would read 'The American Spectator' and I would read 'Mother Jones.'

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.

What we're looking for at my school is intellectuals. People who want to talk about the art and be knowledgeable about it. People who want to know the history. Not everybody needs to be performing.

I go to the lab and in order to interact with my postdoctoral students and try to see if I can shape them to not copy but to ask questions and to think. We have to have a little dialogue because you don't pretend to be the fountain of all wisdom.

I find I process the news by listening to someone else's report.

My dad was a voracious news consumer. I remember just sitting with my family all the time. I would sit on his lap and read the paper with him. He would read it to me.

As an academic, I value the free exchange of ideas.

One great pleasure of being an academic is the ability to trade in ideas with your colleagues and students; it is not much fun being the only connoisseur of some fine point.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.