Critical Thinking Quotes

The manager who comes up with the right solution to the wrong problem is more dangerous than the manager who comes up with the wrong solution to the right problem.

Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

If you want to be wrong then follow the masses.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

When the multitude detests a man, inquiry is necessary; when the multitude likes a man, inquiry is equally necessary.

Now, there are two different attitudes towards learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things that suit our conditions, that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

Always be willing to look at both sides of the argument. Understanding the other side is the best way to strengthen your own.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

Consider data without prejudice.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

To defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

It"s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you"ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you"ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you"ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.

A king can stand people's fighting but he can't last long if people start thinking.

To succeed, you also have to know how to make choices and how to think more broadly.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, "just to keep the people frightened."

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Newspapers should be read for the study of facts. They should not be allowed to kill the habit of independent thinking.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.

Part of what we have to do a better job of, if our democracy is to function in a complicated diverse society like this, is to teach our kids enough critical thinking to be able to sort out what is true and what is false, what is contestable and what is incontestable. And we seem to have trouble with that. And our political system doesn't help.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise.

Don't be misled by History, or any other unreliable source.

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

There is no doubt that our last state will be worse than our first, if we surrender our reason into somebody's keeping.

Children should be taught to question everything . . . everything they read and everything they hear.

Don't be anybody's follower, be a student.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.

I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.

There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice.

You have a brain and mind of your own. Use it, and reach your own decisions

Be yourself and think for yourself, and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the inclusions forced upon you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance.

Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west.

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

When you expand your ability to see, you understand that there are a lot of false choices being offered.

Recollect your thoughts don't get caught up in the mix ,cause the media is full of dirty tricks.

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.

Great intellects are skeptical.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.

That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and as a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American, we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, if we’ve progressed as a society, then you don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.

To the critical intelligence, nothing is left of absolute reality.

... the important thing is to, first of all, question everything you read or hear or see or are told. Question it, and try to see the world for what it actually is, as opposed to what someone or some company or some organization or some government is trying to represent it as, or present it as, however they've mislabeled it or dressed it up or told you.

I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice.You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far.