Ann Widdecombe Quotes

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

I think some people like me because I'm different. I don't think like everybody else. People are so tied up in the worst parts of technology these days. They live a life pressing buttons. They don't use their imaginations.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

You do not move forward by following convention. You celebrate those who are different, who are not burdened by 'normality.'

I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

Wanted: a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say 'No,' though all the world say 'Yes.'

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

In America, educators punish those who actually think for themselves. There is only acceptance for popular opinion.

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.