Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

In the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

… 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.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Notwithstanding this high Ecclesiastical authority, he who dared accept truth only because it could be proved, or proved to be good, and disregard authority, was commonly stigmatized as an infidel.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

We need people to point out groupthink - We need people to point out stale, old, dumb thinking - and we sometimes need to do that when it's considered dangerous, strange, or, by some, offensive. And we should be, all of us, trying to protect that. It's really important.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.

Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allows himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter.

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

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

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. 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.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.