Karl Popper Quotes

Do not allow the Church or the State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

Being the leader means you have to make life or death decisions sometimes.

Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

Intelligence is to provide the facts to us. The facts will usually take you to the truth. And then, when we get the truth, we have got to make the decisions and do what's best for this country.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it-that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life-that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

Thought must never submit, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, save to the facts themselves, because, for thought, submission would mean ceasing to be.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

The first move of leadership is learning to think for yourself.

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma; and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.

Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

When you need to make a decision, don't let your emotions vote.

Don't make decisions by majority vote. The majority is almost always wrong.

Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered what I call the fact-founded, thought-through approach to decision making.

I also believe that everyone needs to think independently and make their own decisions on what makes the most sense.

If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.

Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom.

Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.