Best 183 quotes in «critical thinking quotes» category

Most adults’ minds are still teenagers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

...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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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

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

The first step is developing an open and critical mind, taking the doctrines that are standard and questioning them. Is the United Stated dedicated to democracy? Is Iran the greatest threat to world peace? Do we have a market system? Does the public relations industry try to promote choices or to restrict them? Anything you look at, every one of these things, you have to ask yourself: Is this true? A pretty good criterion is that if some doctrine is widely accepted without qualification, it's probably flawed.

The more intense the belief, the less likely that reason and evidence can dislodge it.

The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realize they can't do everything.

The phrase “fake news” sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test. These euphemisms obscure the fact that the sex-slave story is an out-and-out lie. The people who wrote it knew that it wasn’t true. There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists—and the rest of us—must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have a fact-based opposing side. Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.

There are critical thinking deficiency and insight scarcity in today’s society, which significantly cause more problems, and make existing problems worse.

There are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply.

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.

(The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.

(...)the question of the Jews has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion. If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable forms.

There is a current perception is that science has overtaken Philosophy and in effect rendered Philosophy irrelevant. Science, when sufficiently abstracted, approaches Philosophy in seeking questions we are unaware exist, though from a direction that is based on current measurable knowledge. Philosophy should approach the undiscovered without relying on our current perception of baseline knowledge. Unfortunately, Philosophy has lost significant respect as a critical component of progress and as such has become virtually stagnant with very few significant big ideas or thinkers.

The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.