James F. Byrnes Quotes

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

When a man can take a poll and tell what everybody is thinking, that means nobody is really thinking anymore.

To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe. And I'm not seeing a lot of that right now among a sizable portion of American politics and American voters. I'm not seeing that kind of use of critical thinking, and it really, really freaks me out.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

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

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

I always voted at my party's call, And never thought of thinking for myself at all.

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified.

But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)

When you question what you believe, you leave the world, really, and what the world believes. It puts you in a very interesting position.