Critical Thinking Quotes

“Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.”
― Penn Jillette

“One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“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.”
― Thomas Mann, Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften

“If 'truth' is an 'unveiled reality,' then my truth may not be your truth yet!”
― Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day

“One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".”
― Andrew Roberts

“Creating consent (hegemony) is never a simple act. It is rather the result of the social structures and the cultural patterns that dictates for each group its behavior and for each institutions its practices.”
― Amine Zidouh

“Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.”
― Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

“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.”
― Henry Doss

“Critical thinking is a lost 'art' that has yet to be found, if it is even being looked for".”
― R. Alan Woods, Apologia: A Collection of Christian Essays

“The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.”
― Bryant McGill

“Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]”
― R. Alan Woods

“Vi har noen rettigheter, plikter og verdier vi tar som en selvfølge. Men også selvfølgelighetene må begrunnes og forsvares. De oppleste og vedtatte sannhetene har godt av å bli utfordret, ikke minst for å gi oss anledning til å lese dem opp og vedta dem på nytt.”
― Trine Skei Grande, Ytringsfrihet: 10 essays

“[W]e have an automatic tendency to pay attention to or seek out information that is in agreement with (confirms) our preconceptions, and to ignore, distort or avoid information that contradicts (disconfirms) our preconceptions, a tendency that is called the confirmation bias. The confirmation bias serves to maintain and strengthen the beliefs that we already hold by causing us to automatically (that is, without being aware that we are doing so) perceive and remember experiences that confirm these beliefs, and to ignore or reinterpret those that disconfirm them. Because we tend to seek out only confirming evidence, our beliefs over time become so well confirmed in our minds that we come to think of them as “obviously true." In order to avoid the confirmation bias, we must force ourselves to look for evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.”
― Wadsworth Publishing

“La scuola può educare allo spirito del dialogo non solo in quanto ponga la riflessione su di esso al centro del suo contenuto didattico, ma anche e soprattutto attraverso una diversa via, che le è peculiare. Nella scuola meritevole di questo nome non soltanto si studia la civiltà del dialogo. La si mette in atto: e quindi ci si allena progressivamente ad essa. Il cattivo maestro insegna predicando: il buon maestro conversa e discute con i suoi scolari, perfino quando spiega le cose meno controvertibili, come certe lezioni elementari di aritmetica o di grammatica.”
― Guido Calogero, Logo e dialogo; saggio sullo spirito critico e sulla libertà di coscienza