For those of you who really want to give critical thought to your unique leadership style and foster genuine followership, learn from what’s out there and weave it into something meaningful and authentic.

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...

If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant pastSecurity in human systems we’re told will always always lastEmotions are the sail and blind faith is the mastWithout the breath of real freedom we’re getting nowhere fast.”(History Will Teach Us Nothing)

Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the things they dislike (notably religion) and refusing to apply their skepticism to the things they do like (notably Darwinism). On...

The educated don’t get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history–while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance–might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more...

Taking the Right Decision in any situation only requires TWO major ingredients:Critical Thinking and Grace.Critical Thinking is like ‘Works’ and Grace is like ‘Faith’. So if “Faith without Works is dead,” then same, I believe, goes for Works without Faith.Like the two sides of a coin, one without the other just won’t make any sense....

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain’s seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study of the theory of...

To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance.

This country has a UFO problem, after all. You might not have been aware we have one, or thought about it in these terms, but we do have a UFO problem: namely, we don’t seem to understand what UFO really means. So here it is: a UFO is an unidentified flying object. So any time...

I would like to believe that logic is questioning your reasoning to reach a conclusion.

Critical thinking is a lost ‘art’ that has yet to be found, if it is even being looked for”.

Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the handmaiden of truth.Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error,for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief.Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the...

Believe what you like, but don’t believe everything you read without questioning it.

Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice.

In a world where critical thinking skills are almost wholly absent, repetition effectively leapfrogs the cognitive portion of the brain. It helps something get processed as truth. We used to call it unsubstantiated buy-in. Belief without evidence. It only works in a society where thinking for one’s self is discouraged. That’s how we lost our...

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition’s most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are...

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...

Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.

A mode of thought does not become ‘critical’ simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

Eye-rolling is not exactly the pinnacle of socratic investigation.

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is ‘being offended’.

A rich person is just a poor person with a crown and elaborate clothing, and a poor person is just a rich person with a crownless head and ragged clothing.

(The historian) “was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that’s when the damage gets done and if we don’t keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.

The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

Calling a book “Young Adult” is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But these days people simply say they like to read “Young Adult” books. As if that were a topic. But that’s...

because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another.” But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason...

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,...

The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.

Advanced technology does not always promise a more intelligent civilization. On the contrary, the more the common people rely on technology to do their thinking and solving for them, the less practice there is left for their own brains.

If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.

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.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16

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.

No feeling is wrong. You have the right to your feelings. However, you do not need to wallow in them, and you do not have the right to act them out. The world hasn’t suddenly become your punching bag or litter tray.

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether, very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distraction of radio, but for the moment reading remained the people’s principle method for filling idle time.

The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is...