Alan Alda Quotes

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

I am learning to understand rather than immediately judge or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowled

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.

A lot of people are lazy when it comes to making up their own mind about something, you know? If you're labelled one way then they think thats how you are. It takes too much time to really look into things.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

Opinions should not be allowed to become conclusions

You will never succeed in getting at the truth if you know, ahead of time, what the truth ought to be

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show the darkness but to put out our own eyes.

Education helps one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold.

We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.

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

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

I doubt about myself. I think doubts are good in life. The people who don't have doubts I think only two things-arrogance or not intelligence.

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about.

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

I've learned that you shouldn't have preconceived notions about anybody.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.