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...

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...

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.

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...

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.