intellectual scrutiny Quotes

I’ll take a drug test if you will take an IQ test.

The scientific argument advanced for intelligent design at the Dover trial, those arguments collapsed, scientifically and intellectually.

There is no faith, without a critical mind

Logic helps us to strip off the outward disguise of things, and to behold and judge of them in their own nature.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.

I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

...a distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.

That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith, hardly ever.

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.

Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

It doesn't stand up to huge intellectual scrutiny.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I'm not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.