Jim Rogers Quotes

Facts are important to me, not emotions. I would caution against speculation.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

We shouldn't accept things just because somebody says so.

Conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, take them.

In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Do not believe just because you want to believe.

You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that. Find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

I think the mistake that people make often times is you just lose touch of reality and you have to never be afraid to call someone's bullshit or call someone's bluff when something doesn't make sense.

We have an expression in New York City government - "In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data." It's so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that," without really thinking.

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.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

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.

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

Opinions don't affect facts. But facts should affect opinions, and do, if you're rational

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered what I call the fact-founded, thought-through approach to decision making.

Unless one can think wisely it is better to remain a dummy.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Neither you nor I nor Einstein nor the Supreme Court of the United States is brilliant enough to reach an intelligent decision on any problem without first getting the facts

Communists must always go into the why's and wherefore's of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.

Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

I've always wanted to make the world a more rational place. I'm still working on it.