Best 183 quotes in «critical thinking quotes» category

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.

It's important to realize that sometimes the information you need is hidden behind the information available.

It's ok to follow a leader with a strong positive agenda, but by no means should you forget to take your critical thinking with you.

It takes those who uses telescope of faith to catch a spiritual vision. To see the invisible things of the Spirit you need the eyes of faith. Faith sees beyond the physical eyes. Live and walk by faith. Christianity is a faith walk. The substance and evidence is seen only with the spiritual eyes.

It takes critical thinking to frame the right problem and empathetic thinking to address the correct need.

It was around this time that I started thinking about how skin color defined class. The cowboy movies that fueled the goodness of ‘White’ reinforced attaching ‘darkness’ to a class. I finally took notice that the crayon color called ‘flesh’ did not match mine.

I would like to believe that logic is questioning your reasoning to reach a conclusion.

La scuola può educare allo spirito del dialogo non solo in quanto ponga la riflessione su di esso al centro del suo contenuto didattico, ma anche e soprattutto attraverso una diversa via, che le è peculiare. Nella scuola meritevole di questo nome non soltanto si studia la civiltà del dialogo. La si mette in atto: e quindi ci si allena progressivamente ad essa. Il cattivo maestro insegna predicando: il buon maestro conversa e discute con i suoi scolari, perfino quando spiega le cose meno controvertibili, come certe lezioni elementari di aritmetica o di grammatica.

Most adults’ minds are still teenagers.

Losing your job releases you to think effectively and make rational decisions

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Most people don't think for themselves. They just regurgitate someone else's opinion and pass it off as their own.

Learning, thinking, and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in light of new experiences and facts.

Merely knowing that you are not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd.

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.

Most readers have low standards. All they demand from a book is entertainment.

Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas—like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls—you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims—especially women and girls.

Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht mir, sondern einem anderen Schüler, mit den Worten: "Ich werde dir deine Karriere schon verderben!" Am gleichen Tag las ich bei Storm den Spruch: "Was du immer kannst, zu werden, scheue Arbeit nicht und Wachen, aber hüte deine Seele vor dem Karrieremachen.

No feeling is wrong. You have the right to your feelings. However, you do not need to wallow in them, and you do not have the right to act them out. The world hasn't suddenly become your punching bag or litter tray.

Newspaper accounts must not only be studied, but, occasionally refuted.

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

Reading has not gone out of fashion in the last number of years, nor in the ones while you slept in the asteroid belt. Your relatives do not wish to expose themselves to deep thought, lest they be affected by it.

P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.

Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.

Oversimplifying is the first grave mistake we make when confronted by complexity; overconfidence is the second. And there is a third: based on our overconfidence in our oversimplified conclusions, we overreact.

P14 - People educate each other through the mediation of the world

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it’s all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a “useful” or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results.

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice.

Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.

Se leggi il giornale per informarti, e non sai se la notizia è vera, allora non sei informato.

Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.

Se ci sono differenze nello sviluppo tra Nord e Sud, la colpa è 100% della politica.

Se porti le firme per una legge contro i condannati nella politica al tuo partito, e ti cacciano, allora non è democratico.

She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.

...Society needs to open its collective mind to all ideas and ideologies. It needs to give its people the chance to listen to the opinions of others, and then examine them critically instead of rejecting them prematurely. Such a creative dialogue based on positive critical thinking can enhance and develop ideas.

...something disturbing has happened over the last few decades. The work of the U.S. Civil Service is the same: serving America. Yet today, although the work is still honorable, it is no longer honored.

Some parents whenever their children have an independent thought they wrap them up in warm ignorance and send them to bed

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?” Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is “because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another.” But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don’t know, they don’t care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective.

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum).

Taking the Right Decision in any situation only requires TWO major ingredients: Critical Thinking and Grace. Critical Thinking is like 'Works' and Grace is like 'Faith'. So if "Faith without Works is dead," then same, I believe, goes for Works without Faith. Like the two sides of a coin, one without the other just won't make any sense. And if the coin ever has a third side, it will never be 'Emotions' or 'Sentiments' because they both have zero IQ.

Sunglasses are more useful to a blind man than freedom of speech is to a man who does not think for himself.

The comprehensive mind is always dialectical.

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.

The difference between you and me is that you cannot live without dogmatic truth, whereas I cannot live with it. For you there must be a domain of thought that is consistent with this truth, and therefore, in which you must blindly believe. Contrariwise, for me there can not be an area which can not be questioned and which can not be subjected to critical analysis.

The day he is out of baseball will be the day he starts to think about what comes next. By then, it may be too late.

The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.

The IGAD-Plus's compromise peace agreement is probably pregnant with a noisy, perhaps thunderous baby.

The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.