Alexis Ohanian Quotes

The conventional wisdom of the United States is not always the right conventional wisdom.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Many guys seem to think that his thoughts and feelings are always right and always the best option. I think I am the same kind of guy.

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

It's very scary to me that people actually think we should just follow our leaders. If we can't learn from our history, we're nowhere.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

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

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

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.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

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

I can think of nothing worse than a think-tank where everybody agreed.

Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.