Cornel West 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.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

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

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

I'm raised to actually think, to use my brain.

Think for yourself and question authority.

My goal is never to push anyone to do anything other than think.

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

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

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.

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.

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

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

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

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head.

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

...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.

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.

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.

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.