Carlos Castaneda Quotes

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

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!

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything.

Judging people you don't know for things you don't understand is just really stupid.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

The only thing worse than human ignorance is human pride in that ignorance.

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

It's usually easier to rouse stupidity to action than to arouse wisdom to effort, for wisdom sees alternatives while stupidity lacks the imagination to do this. All sinister interests in a country can depend ultimately upon the strength of stupidity.

stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves

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

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

Bigotry is the sacred disease, and self-conceit tells lies.

Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they are specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as everybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

I agree some people are biased, and I agree that they exist in a world of pure, sheer, raw hatred for anything they don't agree with, but I do believe they're also ignorant. I think they're dumb as skunks. I don't think they've been educated. They haven't the ability to hear and listen to common sense and understand what it is.