Henry Adams Quotes

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.

There’s too much orthodoxy in the political process today.

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Many have built their careers buttressing the status quo, reinforcing what they've already accomplished, and resisting the radical thinking that can topple their legacy - not exactly the attitude you want when trying to drive innovation forward.

Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

It is impossible to advance new theories... when you are under the influence of a particular view, or under the pressure of a particular dogma.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

... in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.

The rule is not written anywhere, it's not etched in any  -  but, I mean, that's the prevailing attitude of this entire society. Don't have an adventure.

A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it.

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home.