Critical Thinking Quotes

Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

I beg of you always to dwell upon the necessity of a thorough understanding of principles, in order to stop the vivacity of his mind, and please do not forget to meditate upon the subject of our discussion.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

I am grateful for even the sharpest criticism as long as it addresses the point.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

I'm a big believer in,'If anyone can understand my politics, I've failed.' If you can get a sense of which side of the fence I'm on, then I'm not doing a service. I'm preaching, and that's not my job.

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Questioning is the great strength of democracy; the ability to doubt without losing face

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

I read the paper every day and the Bible every day; that way I know what both sides are up to.

My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober.