Alfred Whitney Griswold Quotes

We have to replace our focus on personalities with a focus on ideas so that the opinionated and self-serving pronouncements and forms of cyber-bullying are replaced by thoughtful dialogue and open-minded conversation.

We don’t need to ban bad ideas. We just need to criticize bad ideas.

I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It's all just a use of your thinking.

What the nation's built on is discussion, contradiction and growth, and at the moment you can't discuss anything. If you do start to discuss it, you get criticized. If people hate us, you have to find out why and try to solve that problem.

I'm always open to the possibility that somebody's got a better idea than I have. It happens with some frequency.

The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Worst ideas? Me? Whatever do you mean? There are no bad ideas.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

An actual scientist embraces debate because it sharpens their research.

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

I think if you're really good at what you do, you can see outside the box.

Everything has been thought of before... the real problem is to think of it again.

Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together.

Kids have some of the best ideas - bringing new eyes to old problems.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.