Inflexible Beliefs Quotes

There is no great danger to politics in the desire for certainty at any price.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

Clear and precise ideas are the most dangerous, for one does not dare to change them.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

A dogmatical spirit inclines a man to be censorious of his neighbors. Every one of his opinions appears to him written, as it were, with sunbeams, and he grows angry that his neighbors do not see it in the same light. He is tempted to disdain his correspondents as men of low and dark understandings because they do not believe what he does.

Far too many of our elected officials are chained to an ideology that is rooted in the past. They are keepers of normalcy who embrace things as they've always been.

The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.

One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them.

Dogmas are the toys that amuse and can satisfy but unreasoning children. They are the offspring of human speculation and prejudiced fancy.

If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you.

Under attack, sentiments harden into dogma.

I don't like the tendency on the part of so many people today to think that those who don't agree with them are bad. In fact, I find that very dangerous.

A doctrinaire is a fool but an honest man.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

Men's prejudices rest upon their character for the time being and cannot be overcome, as being part and parcel of themselves. Neither evidence nor common sense nor reason has the slightest influence upon them.

I wouldn't say that dittoheads, as a group, lack the ability to reason. It's just that whenever I run across one, he seems to be at a low ebb in reasoning skills.

His major flaw may be that he is a prisoner of his own convictions…. He refuses to endorse laws with which he disagrees.

Every church pretends to have found the exact truth. This is the end of progress. Why pursue that which you have? Why investigate when you know? Every creed is a rock in running water: humanity sweeps by it. Every creed cries to the universe, "Halt!" A creed is the ignorant Past bullying the enlightened Present. The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. They demand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, are of no value to them. They demand the complete circle... the entire structure.

I don't really have a problem 'cause I know who these people are, I know that they're scared to death. I know these leftists with scared and they oppose and that they're inflexible.

I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

The hardening of the attitudes is the most deadly disease on the face of the earth.