Charles H. Townes Quotes

Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

I get a sense that we've all been educated into one school of thought. I'm not surprised at all to find among the overwhelming majority of scientists, are people who would hold one particular view because that's all they're exposed to.

When you sit on something for so long you can't see beyond it. It's all you can see, so you become locked in it.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

Talking with people who agree with you is like jogging in a cul de sac.

Prejudice locks the mind. Nothing can enter. Nothing true can escape.

The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves.

Denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

Where all think alike, none thinks very much.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

It is a curious foible of a certain type of mind that it is unable to imagine a newspaper editor as one who may, on some public questions, honestly have the same view as that held by other persons.

Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can't move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.

Adults have pretty much made up their minds - they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.

We were raised to believe that our way of seeing the world was the only way.

We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.

It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

People can be in a prison of their own mind. [There are] people who don't have their hearts open to other people's ideas, and can't listen to other people's ideas without feeling like they're being slapped in the face. Those people are more in a prison.

You can't tell big dreams to small minded people.

But intolerant,narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host,change form,and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

She live in a mindset that I could never move to

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

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