Louis L'Amour Quotes

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

People who think well, write well

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

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.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

The real question, therefore, is not whether students should be taught to think critically and self-reflectively, but instead what they should be thinking critically about.

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.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

I'm always like that about everything. When I try to do something, I always think, "What is the best way to do this?" Instead of taking what everyone else says and how it has been forever, it's faster for me to try myself. Of course I listen to what everybody says, and at first I'll try what people say, but I always come back to trying it my way.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.

I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.

No matter how close thought sticks to the actual, it follows its own rules.

I think people have common sense and can tell what's real, what's right or what's wrong and work it out.