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Critical Thinking Quotes

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Critical Thinking Quotes

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”

ThinkingReasonPhilosophyPurposeBeliefNatureSinExistenceDoubtAtheismHuman NatureThoughtsReflectionEternityMiracleBlindMetaphorMythMeaningMeaning Of LifePurpose Of LifeResurrectionBlindnessReligious FaithCritical ThinkingChristian FaithBlind FaithIntoxicationOriginWasted LifeSinfulResurrection Of JesusCritical ThoughtChristian MiracleDeath Of ReasonDoubt Is SinFoundation Of Belief
Book:Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
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“Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being.”

LifeSelfPhilosophyScienceSimpleEmotionTechnologyMeditationSocietyStressPressureSimplicityComplicatedThoughtSubstancePhilosophy Of LifeTaoismFeelingBeingModern LifeCritical ThinkingModern SocietyHecticDaoism
Author:Arthur Rosenfeld
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“All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant. Total doubt about all authority is naïveté about the particular authority that reads emotions and breeds cynicism. To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.”

ReasonFreedomEmotionHistoryCritical ThinkingAuthoritarianism
Book:The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
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“When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.”

PhilosophyRealityTruthSpeechLogicMarketingBullshitCritical ThinkingDepictionCritical Examination
Book:On Bullshit
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“If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.”

ReasonPhilosophyHumorAgeFunnyIndividualGrowthSocietyCrazyChildhoodHumourHard WorkDevelopmentJokesAdultsLogicMadnessMadMajorityIndividualityPhilosopherCriticalInsaneInsanityMaturitySatireMatureConformityThinkerSanityChildOriginalitySheepAphorismSaneThinkConformJokeToilCritical ThinkingAphorismsGrowUnreasonableImmatureChildlikeCrazinessAdultNonconformityIllogicalImmaturityOriginalDevelopAphoristThinkersAphoristsIndependent ThinkingThink For YourselfHerd MentalityMinorityStandardOriginal ThoughtPhilosophersChildishEarnHerdSheepleThinking For YourselfIndependent ThinkersOriginal ThinkerAge Is Nothing But A NumberIndependent ThinkerMonkey BananaMr Follow FollowOriginal ThinkersReach AdulthoodSilver Plater
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.”

SelfReasonPhilosophyFactsGovernmentEvilBeliefPeaceFreedomEducationLibertyKnowledgeLearningVirtueDangerousMoralityEthicsEvidenceUniversalLibertarianProofRationalAnarchySecularSelf KnowledgeRationalityCoercionCritical ThinkingSuperstitionIndoctrinationStatismBrainwashingVoluntaryismAncapRelearningUniversal EthicsUniversally Preferable Behavior
Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the small fly which has landed on it! Why do you do such a thing?”

PeopleInspirational QuotesInspirational LifeSelf LoveWisdom QuotesInspirational AttitudePositivityEnvyPositive AttitudeSelf AcceptanceNegativitySelf KnowledgeCritical ThinkingNegative AttitudeThe Nature Of Envy
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“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.”

SchoolWorkEducationAmbitionEmpowermentWritersDedicationCareerGiftsTalentsCritical ThinkingIndependent Thought
Book:Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften
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“Hippasus’ proof—or at least Nico’s retelling of it—was really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn’t even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over. It was Peter who broke the silence, “I’m not sure I understand what we have done.” Nico seemed to be expecting such a response. “Step back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ..." He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us. “But you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you—it’s really quite delightful.” Now there was excitement in Nico’s voice.”

UnderstandingTeachMathematicsProofMeaningCritical ThinkingWhyContextStep Back
Book:A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel
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“One lie might eye the highest throne / inside the castle of your mind, / and any whim may play the lord / when left unchecked, out of control, / once knights of reason flee their posts, / let sentiments invade these walls, / then leave the keep without defense. / How easily a kingdom falls! (from Interior Kingdom)”

MindReasonThoughtsEmotionsLiesDeceptionKingdomCastlesKnightsCritical Thinking
Book:The Humbling and Other Poems
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“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.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“Unconditional praise of life and happiness. Existenz uber alles! This fierce optimism, this idealism, which sees the worst catastrophes, the worst corruption as having a right to claim mitigating circumstances. The critical spirit is not dead, contrary to the opinion of the Enlightenment nostalgics. It has simply metabolized into all the ironic procedures, all the sardonic artifices in which we play, smugly, on our own incredulity. 'The Last Man, talking to himself while shaking his head incredulously,' said Nietzsche. Excess today, our contemporary 'hubris', is the excess of universal hybridization - like the fluorescent rabbit that is a cross between a rabbit and an octopus - and of making everything copulate with itself like the crepidula fornicata.”

OptimismCritical ThinkingEduardo Kac
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Experience was what Galileo considered key to formulating accurate theories, since experience, which is literally defined as exposure to and observation of facts and events, gives one a tangible, real-life occurrence that substantiates a statement, rather than raw logic, which leads one to consider what’s plausible based on probability and deduction but not necessarily what’s true. Raw logic, Galileo knew, could lead one to discover a possibility, but not an actuality. Experience exposes the facts of the REAL WORLD, not what logic and reasoning, or the mind alone can create. Aristotle did not want to rely on abstractions and intangibilities, but in reality, he did, as he used sole logic.”

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Book:For the Intellect
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“Critical thinking using root definitions is a skill set that allows an individual, by themselves, to judge and settle disputes as well as set limits on what is considered to be morally ethical and correct manners of someone who has one’s behavior in society. However, critical thinking is much more than its root definition. Critical thinking is skillfully defining, intellectualizing, analyzing, and evaluating data and information gathered from all sources and producing belief and action in rhetoric that provides clarity and consistency through evidence and reason.”

LogicRhetoricGrammarCritical ThinkingDefinition
Book:COVID19 – Short Path to 'You'll Own Nothing. And You'll Be Happy.': Welcome to the New Age of Tyranny
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“For example, in the example with Terry and Chester, a person who was just beginning to meet the two could come up with the conclusion based on those two axioms, which a friend revealed to him/her. The person might try to come up with a solution to Terry’s hatred of Chester’s voice, and decide to teach the two characters American Sign Language, so Chester wouldn’t have to speak, but the person might later on discover that Terry seems to be functioning normally when Chester talks during casual, everyday conversations. It’s not that the person’s logic was incorrect; the conclusion was logically valid and logically followed the two axioms. It’s just that the axioms were accepted and assumed to be true. In reality, when the friend of Terry and Chester was referring to Chester’s “voice,” the friend was talking about Chester’s singing voice, not Chester’s actual voice, and the phrase “Terry hates everything Chester likes” could have been used hyperbolically, meaning that Terry does not literally hate everything Chester likes. The person came up with a logical conclusion, but the axioms were just immediately accepted as true; the person was not evaluating or verifying the information, nor was the person analyzing the multiple meanings behind the axioms. With critical thinking, however, there are a few stages that are required before making a conclusion: there is remember and understand, so to understand information, a person would need to see if the information makes sense or is plausible. For example, if a person was learning about the properties of matter, he/she should be able to understand that it makes sense for liquid to have faster moving molecules than solid matter, because it does not have a definite shape unless it is put into some container, or he/she might try to scroll through multiple sources of information to fill any gaps in understanding and confirm information. Unlike logic, which immediately accepts axioms as true to create a conclusion, a person must look at information with a critical eye in order to truly understand it in critical thinking. In addition, I think there is more skill and effectiveness behind deeply thinking about information (critical thinking) than trying to discover information (logic.) When it comes to thinking about the information (critical thinking), a person would have to understand the information’s real-world application (apply), the components of the information (analyze), the significance of the information (evaluate), and what can be made out with that information (synthesize.) Logic is an objective approach to trying to discover valid information, and it is highly important, but there is that lack of deep thinking when it comes to logic alone. A person would need critical thinking to verify the axioms and see the significance of the conclusion. Logic itself cannot view the significance of the conclusion Terry hates Chester’s voice, because it is meant to discover information based on axioms, not evaluate and make something out of information. With this, I do find that critical thinking is more important and has a higher range of skill than logic.”

PhilosophyLogicThoughtCritical ThinkingSkill
Book:The Reformation
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“I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with 35 cents and people would be glad to feed me. I believed Mao was cute. I believed private property was wrong. I believed my girlfriend was a witch. I believed my parents were Nazi space monsters. I believed the university was putting saltpeter in the cafeteria food. I believed stones had souls. I believed the NLF were the good guys in Vietnam. I believed Lyndon Johnson was plotting to murder all the Negroes. I believed Yoko Ono was an artist. I believed Bob Dylan was a musician. I believed I would live forever or until I was 21, whichever came first. I believed the world was coming to an end. I believed the Age of Aquarius was about to begin. I believed the I Ching said to cut classes and take over the Dean's office. I believed wearing my hair long would end poverty and injustice. I believed there was a great throbbing web of cosmic mucus and we were all part of it somehow. I managed to believe Gandhi and H. Rap Brown at the same time. With the exception of anything my mom and dad said, I believed everything.”

BeliefLogicProofCritical Thinking
Author:P J O'Rourke
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“Overview of the Fallacy of Division by Austin Cline In critical thinking, we often come across statements that fall victim to the fallacy of division. This common logical fallacy refers to an attribution placed onto an entire class, assuming that each part has the same property as the whole. These can be physical objects, concepts, or groups of people. By grouping elements of a whole together and assuming that every piece automatically has a certain attribute, we are often stating a false argument. This falls into the category of a fallacy of grammatical analogy. It can apply to many arguments and statements we make, including the debate over religious beliefs. The fallacy of division is similar to the fallacy of composition but in reverse. This fallacy involves someone taking an attribute of a whole or a class and assuming that it must also necessarily be true of each part or member. The fallacy of division takes the form of: X has property P. Therefore, all parts (or members) of X have this property P. Here are some obvious examples of the Fallacy of Division: The United States is the richest country in the world. Therefore, everyone in the United States must be rich and live well. [So pointing out one poor American does not refute the proposition that the United States is a rich country.]”

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Author:Austine Cline
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“The human brain is an organ out of time. It stands as evolved and best suited for daily life in the Pleistocene yet here it is, having to make do in a modern, high-tech, wired, and fast-changing world.”

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Book:Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed
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“The worst thing about logic - it is not democratic. Logic wears an autocratic mask. No compromises are made there for things are binary. Only intellectual standards democratise it to make it human. That is why you joined rationality with character. Rationality is autocratic - what is wrong does not live for long. Wrong facts, theories, and conclusions die - useless to apply in spite of their unlimited supply.”

LogicRationalityCritical ThinkingLogical Thinking
Book:Questology
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“[T]hough in all practical matters it is indispensable, either always or mostly, to follow custom, to do what is generally done, in theoretical matters it is simply untrue. In practical matters there is a right of the first occupant: what is established must be respected. In theoretical matters this cannot be. Differently stated: The rule of practice is 'let sleeping dogs lie,' do not disturb the established. In theoretical matters the rule is 'do not let sleeping dogs lie.' Therefore, we cannot defer to precedent . . . .”

LogicCritical ThinkingFallaciesLeo StraussAd Populum Fallacy
Book:On Plato's Symposium
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