John Leo Quotes

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.

I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.

... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the "new age" label at them is also abhorrent.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

Thou shalt not believe something just because you can explain it.

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

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

Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.

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.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

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 genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff.

Convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking.

We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.

Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles: How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? The answer: Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate — may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical — always think for yourself.

If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.