Karyn Kusama Quotes

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

The world so clamors for action that men and women devote little time to thinking. Many believe in secondhand thinking. They find it easier to ascertain and adopt the thoughts of others than to think for themselves.

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.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

… 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.

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

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

I cannot look at a question and not try to find the answer, even if I don't know it.

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

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

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.

I just was raised always to question and be as informed as I can be.

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 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.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, "This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me."

The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.

Freethinkers are generally those who never think at all.

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Read less, study less, but think more

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.

...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.