J. C. R. Licklider Quotes

Thinking is one of the most important weapons in dealing with problems

Who knows the minds of men and how they reason and what their methodology is? But I am not going to extrapolate from the General Conference backing out on my book and make it a personal issue.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.

I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

Information work is thinking work.

Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

I don't have confidence in my instincts, and I feel like I have to go through a very right-brain and left-brain process.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.