Cognitive Independence Quotes

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

If, two people have good minds and they're looking at problems, if they agree all the time it means one of them is not thinking. If they disagree all the time, it means one of them is not thinking. They're just allowing their political position to dictate their position on an issue. And I think that's unhealthy. And the public knows better.

No one thinks in your mind except you.

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

It is a great proof of talents to be able to recall the mind from the senses, and to separate thought from habit.

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.

I cannot really be responsible for other people's thought processes.

Every individual in the church is free to think as he pleases.

In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.

The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain, reason should be enthroned as king.

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

Dare to think for yourself.

Reason and the reasoning faculty need no foreign assistance, but are sufficient for their own purposes. They move within themselves, and make directly for the point in view. Wherefore, acts in accordance with them are called right acts, for they lead along the right road.

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

If my body is enslaved, still my mind is free.