Paul Broca Quotes

Never assume the obvious is true.

Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.

It is only by questioning what people take for granted, what people hold to be true, that we can break through the hypnosis of social conditioning.

Interrogate yours hidden assumptions

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

I think the reason why 'Red Eye' is popular is because we question the common assumptions that you find elsewhere.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

Conventional wisdom is not always wrong.

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

Do not believe just because you want to believe.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

We must strive for literacy and education that teach us to never quit questioning and probing at the assumptions of the day.

If you don't question you're stuck within a pre-existing parameters of knowledge. Questions are what take you outside of those parameters.

Test everything, including assumptions

Never believe what you cannot doubt.

I don't want you to trust me, I want you to question everything I say.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.