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.

Blessed are the doubters: for they shall not be easily fooled.

To learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.

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

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own...

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

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

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

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

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

A great truth wants to be criticized not idolized

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

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...

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.

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...

A book can tell me anything it wants to, but I sure as shit don’t have to believe it.

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

Watch a man–say, a politician–being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to...

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

A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who’s not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he’s a criminal, in a green costume he’s a hero who gets a parade and a...

Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.

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.

POppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.

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...

A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.

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

If ‘truth’ is an ‘unveiled reality,’ then my truth may not be your truth yet!

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.

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

All great people had critics but they still believe in the beauty of their dreams, fully persuaded to stay focused and determined for the realisationof their dreams.

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...

I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told “That’s offensive” as though those two words constitute an argument.

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.

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

If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.’...

Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

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

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

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

A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.

If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.

We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.

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...

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

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 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...

Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill”.~R. Alan Woods [2012]

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.