Think for Yourself

“Great minds think for themselves.â€? – Immanuel Kant    

“So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.â€? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.â€? – Mark Twain

“A free society is a place where it’s safe to be unpopular.â€? – Adlai Stevenson

“It isn’t the questions that get us into trouble; it’s the answers.� – Tom Brokaw

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.â€? – George Orwell

“The opposite of bravery is not cowardice, but conformity.â€? – Robert Anthony

“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.â€? – Eleanor Roosevelt

“Wisdom doesn’t automatically come with old age. Nothing does — except wrinkles. It’s true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.â€? – Abigail van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman)

“Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.â€? – Tobias Smollett

“The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.â€? – H.L. Mencken

“During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.â€? – Bernard Baruch

“Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation. “– Sid Taylor

“True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.â€? – Akhenaton

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.â€? – André Gide

“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.â€? – Noam Chomsky

“The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it.� – Charles Sanders Peirce

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.â€? – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.â€? – Aristotle

“I never learned from a man who agreed with me.â€? – Robert A. Heinlein

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.â€? – J. Bronowski

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.â€? – George Bernard Shaw

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.â€? – Oscar Wilde (Yes, I get the irony.)

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’“ – H.L.Mencken

“If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.â€? – Sir Francis Bacon

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.â€? – Voltaire

“If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.â€? – Voltaire

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.â€? – Richard Francis Burton

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.â€? – Thomas Jefferson

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.â€? – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.â€? – Arthur C. Clarke

If your beliefs can not withstand scrutiny, they probably need it.

(because…)

“It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.â€? – Alfred Adler (and nothing good will come from that.)

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.� – Winston Churchill

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.â€? – George Santayana

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.â€? – Carl Gustav Jung

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.â€? – Anais Nin

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.â€? – George Bernard Shaw

“The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.â€? – Thomas Huxley

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts� – Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard – every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.â€? – Erich Fromm

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.â€? – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.â€? – John Galsworthy (Pragmatism increases in direct proportion to one’s closeness to the problem.)

“In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.â€? – Anne Sophie Swetchine

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.â€? – Philip K. Dick

“Reason is the cause of the falsification of the evidence of the senses.� – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.â€? – Matthew 15:14

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
 

“Where the way is hardest, there go thou: Follow your own path, and let people talk.” – Dante Alighieri
 

“Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.” – Learned Hand
 

“A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.” – Aldous Huxley
 

“Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.” – Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
 

“Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 

39.       The disappointed man speaks. – I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal. – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
 
“An individualist is a man who says: ‘I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule or be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.’” – Ayn Rand

 

“Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.� – Ayn Rand
 

“Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.” – Hodding Carter

 

“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.” – Ida M. Tarbell

 

“Where the way is hardest, there go thou: Follow your own path, and let people talk.” – Dante Alighieri

 

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

 

“When dealing with a concept such as ‘important’, one would be well advised to ask: ‘To whom?’” – Fran Lebowitz