Shane Carruth Quotes

I don't want your vote. I want something more important. I want your commitment to think. Because once you start thinking, I'll get your vote.

I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!

Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an academic background.

I think that, at the end of the day, I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it.

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

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

I only surround myself with people who are intellectually stimulating.

There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level - forget about the media - than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap.

It is my nature to thin where others read.

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day.

Once I completed the Cube and demonstrated it to my students, I realized it was nearly impossible to put down.

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Posing good questions is harder than it might seem... It's hard because asking good questions requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful. ... Great leaders don't have all the answers, but they know how to ask the right questions - questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking onto the matter.

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

I'm a true believer in story. I think when you just tell people to think, people tend to get resistant and defensive and feel like you're accusing them of not thinking.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

The way I look at it is, when you allow people to submerge themselves into a story, they will react by thinking through what it's about. That's just so much more fun and effective, I think, than a lecture.

I don't like the intellectual label.