Nathaniel Branden Quotes

I don't substitute anybody else's judgment for my own.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

I listen with attention to the judgment of all men; but so far as I can remember, I have followed none but my own..

I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

Learn to do your own thinking - don’t let other people do it for you!

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

In my limited experience, you have to make your own decisions in life and experience things for yourself.

You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west.

Self-reliance leads to intellectual independence. Each man must think for himself, must train the mind to think, must habituate the soul to observe and analyze.

I really like individualism based on truth.

Learn to depend upon yourself by doing things in accordance with your own way of thinking.

I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve.

What? You're thinking for yourself? You're deciding on your own? You're applying your own yardsticks, your own judgments, your own values? Who do you think you are, anyway? And, indeed, that is precisely the question you are answering.

I don't think I have ever taken any 'offbeat' advice. Actually, I don't know I take any advice very often. I trust my own instincts and seek out information so I can make fully informed decisions. That's what's worked for me.

Determine to do some thinking for yourself. Don't live entirely upon the thoughts of others. Don't be an automaton.

I hope that the message I conveyed in 'Julie of the Wolves' is to tell young people to think things out. Think independently.

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

I don't listen to people's opinions. I have people around me who I can trust, but most of all I listen to myself.

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

I don't think that I have ever been rebellious. The thing is that I don't believe in people - what people tell me. I have to accept it in my own brain first. I don't listen to anyone, never.

The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.