Harvey Cox Quotes

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Think for yourself and question authority.

I'm someone who does not like a bunker mentality and does not like groupthink.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

The essence of an individual’s freedom is the opportunity to deviate from traditional ways of thinking and of doing things.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you

A man who doesn't think differently from his time and environment can't grow beyond his time and environment.

... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.

Read less, study less, but think more

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

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

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.