Critical Thinking Quotes

32 Sourced quotes

Donald Rumsfeld

Boris Yeltsin

Raymond Chandler

Leon Trotsky

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion.... the converse was true also — faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

The school has not taught how to learn; now it wants to climb that Mt. Everest of intellect, critical thought. Critical thinking can only be learned by the discussion of an idea which is part of a subject, under the guidance of an able thinker. Thinking is like piano-playing; it is shown, not taught.

For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking.

In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

Donald Rumsfeld

Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation. It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas. It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They're valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.

Critical thinking, in short, offers the way to keep science and technology in harness.

Kenneth Ludmerer

Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus [to take control of a person].

Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.

The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills.

Tom Flynn (author)

The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.

Massimo Pigliucci

I think people in power have a vested interest to oppose critical thinking.

We still remain prone to doctrines, philosophies, faiths, and beliefs that spread through the populations of entire civilizations. It is hard to imagine any foolproof ways to protect ourselves from such infections.... the best we can do is to try to educate our children to learn more skills of critical thinking and methods of scientific verification.

And this is why studying the history of psi is important. People have been reporting these phenomena for millennia and studying them for centuries. Human experiences that continue to be repeated throughout history and across cultures, are not due to ignorance or lack of critical thinking, and demand a serious explanation.

I am passionate about everything in my life—first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. —bell hooks

Reflection upon situationality is reflection about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means which people discover each other to be 'in a situation.'

Islam was not always so close minded. During the 'Golden age' – between the 9th and 11th century – there existed a tradition of critical thinking in the Muslim world.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Raymond Chandler

The Soviet Union needs thinking and critical friends, such as are capable not only of singing hymns in the hours of success, but of not shrinking in the hour of defeat and danger.

In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking.

I argue that such disciplines must be related to theology in its primary meaning, if their presence in a single 'theological' faculty is to be defended. But I do not suggest that theology is for believers only. I discuss the question, in what sense it is possible for atheists to be theologians, and suggest a way of thinking of theology as consisting of serious, open questions, well worth studying for their own sake in the university, with all the critical and scholarly tools available there. Theology, then, is neither a closed, in-group activity for believers, nor just an intriguing aspect of the history of religions.

Brian Hebblethwaite

Feminist theory has left an indelible mark on my own critical—and creative—thinking... For me, everything I questioned about what it meant to be a man – and how much my sexuality would perpetually challenge those meanings—could be found in arguments posed by feminists. What can I say? I identified.

If Critical Systems Thinking is to contribute to enlightened societal practice, e. g., with respect to the pressing environmental and social issues of our time, it should be accessible not only to well-trained decision makers and academics but also to a majority of citizens.

Robert L. Flood