Monica Crowley Quotes

Obstinacy and heat of opinion are the surest proof of stupidity.

I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

Everybody seems to be imprisoned in their own sectarian or political affiliations. They don't seem to be able to rise above these things.

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

Sadly, in the highest levels of economic thought in government, questions are not tolerated. It is as if we're dealing with the binary thinking of a fundamentalist religion.

We want to have our beliefs, and we want to enforce them on everyone else, but we don't want to have to think about everything that comes along with it.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

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

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

I don't believe in any kind of fundamentalism.

Dogmatism makes for scientific anemia.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

There is no bigotry like that of 'free thought' run to seed.

Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion. While nothing is so foolish and baseless.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

The sin of certainty leaves no room for the rest of us.

The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men.

The trouble with radicals is that they read only radical literature, and the trouble with conservatives is that they don't read anything.

It comes to pass that men do so magnify their own opinions, and are as censorious of any that differ from them in lesser things