Rajneesh Quotes

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

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

In Ministry, we've only had one message: Think for yourself.

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.

A thinking man can never be a party man.

Never prevent men from forming judgments according to their intellect

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allows himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

While we honour religion and believe it to be a powerful factor in elevating our race, we discriminate, as we hope our readers will also do, between it and dogmatism. Dogmatism has been the bane of civilization and a curse to mankind. It has degraded our sex, stifled intelligent inquiry, and persecuted every independent reformer and every noble cause.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.

I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Be yourself and think for yourself, and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the inclusions forced upon you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance.

Doubting everything and believing everything are two equally convenient solutions that guard us from having to think

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.

If they told us what to believe, and we didn't come to it on our own, is it still true?

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?