Each of the following
quotes either exemplifies critical thought, or illuminates a problem in human
thought which critical thinking addresses.
But if thought is to
become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done
with fear. It is fear that holds men back — fear lest their cherished
beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live
should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves should prove less worthy of
respect than they have supposed themselves to be.
~ Bertrand Russell (Principles
of Social Reconstruction)
You assist an evil
system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system
never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A
good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
~
Mahatma Gandhi
During times of
universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Big Government and
Big Business ... will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults
and their children. To achieve this they will (unless prevented) make use of
all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to
reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and
threats of physical violence. If this kind of tyranny is to be avoided, we must
begin without delay to educate ourselves and our children for freedom and
self-government. Such an education for freedom should be ... first of all in
facts and in values — the facts of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness
and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity, which are the ethical
corollaries of these facts.
~ Aldous Huxley:
(Brave New World Revisited)
The voice of protest,
of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and
drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall
in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more
than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.
~ Charles Eliot Norton
The trouble with the
world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell
The propagandist’s
purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people
are human.
~ Aldous Huxley
The shepherd always
tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
~ Stendhal
The great masses of
the people…will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
~ Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf, 1933
Any formal attack on
ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their
most precious possession – their ignorance.
~ Hendrik Van Loon
The trouble with most
folks isn’t so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain’t so.
~ Josh Billings
I have sworn upon the
altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I am mortified to be
told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a
subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Without censorship,
things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
~ General William Westmoreland
So long as a man
rides his hobbyhorse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and
neither compels you or me to get up behind him – pray, Sir, what have either
you or I to do with it?
~ Laurence Sterne, 1759
Men become civilized,
not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to
doubt.
~ H. L. Mencken
The will of the
people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its
free expression should be our first object.
~ Thomas Jefferson,
First Inaugural Address, 1801
It is not only vain,
but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature,
and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in
order to punish them.
~ Thomas Jefferson,
1779
We are all tolerant
enough of those who do not agree with us, provided only they are sufficiently
miserable.
~ David Grayson
We learn from history
that we do not learn from history.
~ George Wilhelm Hegel
Patriotism is your
conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you
were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw
There is no slavery
but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll
The highest result of
education is tolerance.
~ Helen Keller
Education’s purpose
is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
~ Malcolm S. Forbes
Hastiness and
superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than
anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our
scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and
misguided men.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
He that would make
his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.
~ Thomas Paine, 1795
The hottest places in
hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
~ John F. Kennedy
We think so because
other people all think so; or because – or because – after all we do think so;
or because we were told so, and think we must think so; or because we once
thought so, and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we
think we will think so…
~ Henry Sidgwick
To every complex
question there is a simple answer and it is wrong…
-
Life to many is a
battle. Life to some is a quest. Life to me is a school
§
Paseda
Ademola Adefemi
-
To
every rejection, there is always a direction
§
Paseda
Ademola Adefemi
-
When
the value and purpose of a thing is not known, abuse and misuse is inevitable
§
Paseda
Ademola Adefemi