Hannah Arendt Quotes

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west.

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

Self-reliance leads to intellectual independence. Each man must think for himself, must train the mind to think, must habituate the soul to observe and analyze.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

I think it's very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.

When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.

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.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Learn to do your own thinking - don’t let other people do it for you!

A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling.

We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally - that is, for himself - which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

I think people are looking for an alternative because in addition to there being sort of a myopic, lemming - like ants on a sugar cube mentality on this DNS attack story by many in the media, there's just this culture of sameness. Everybody sounds the same.

No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one to whom it is told another fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.

When everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.

When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate — may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical — always think for yourself.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own

My whole life is a contradiction on purpose - to make you think. I think people have forgetten how to have their own opinions. They're always waiting for someone to tell them what to do and what to wear - it's so boring.

By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.