Analytical Reasoning Quotes

Avoid independent thinking! How is such independent thinking manifest? A common way is by questioning the council that is provided by God’s visible organization

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

With thought, all problems can be resolved.

Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

I'm more of an engineer with a law degree than I am a lawyer with an engineering degree in terms of how I think.

A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

I was always one of those guys who was a seeker after truth. I want to know what's going on.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

History should be written as philosophy.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

I never stop reading. I read everything, and I read every day. If you never read anything, be curious. Curiosity is the true foundation of education, reading things that we've factually already agreed on, and I love reading books. With that said, it's more important that you ask the question 'why.'

[It has become] … a principal ground whereon was reared up that Speculating phalanx.

I taught at the FBI for four decades - how to think outside of the box and deal with social engineering.

Algebras deal not with laws of number, but with such laws of the human thinking machinery as have been discovered in the course of investigations on numbers. Plane geometry deals with such laws of thought as were discovered by men intent on finding out how to measure surface; and solid geometry with such additional laws of thought as were discovered when men began to extend geometry into three dimensions.

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

I had higher math SATs than in English - yet I became an English major in college.

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

I just try to stuff my brain with everything that I can read on what is going on in science at a very high level, and sometimes I see connections of what might need to be done.

We're always looking for candidates that have new approaches to problems.

It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again." Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.