William Safire Quotes

I don't like accepting things at face value.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.

I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, 'I better reexamine my position!' I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there's nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

We’ve learned our lesson. We are not going to take any more intelligence at face value.

It is important that students bring a certain …, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

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.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

I don't want you to trust me, I want you to question everything I say.

You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.

Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.

The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.

It's always good in science to say "Well how do you know that?" and "Are you really sure?" and "Could there be an exceptional case?"

Instead of assuming everything you're being told is the truth, ask plenty of questions.

If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

... the important thing is to, first of all, question everything you read or hear or see or are told. Question it, and try to see the world for what it actually is, as opposed to what someone or some company or some organization or some government is trying to represent it as, or present it as, however they've mislabeled it or dressed it up or told you.

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

Doubt is an element of criticism, and the tendency of criticism is necessarily skeptical.

It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

If it's worth listening to, it's worth questioning until you understand it.