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Quotes about thinking

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I simply claim that what ideas I have, I have a right to express; and that any man who denies that right to me is an intellectual thief and robber. That is all.
Robert G. Ingersoll1833–1899The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
- Freedom
- Ideas
Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
John Steinbeck1902–1968East of Eden (1952), Part 2, Ch. 13. i
- Ideas
Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success.
Ludwig von Mises1881–1973Liberalism (1927), Ch. 1: The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 10: The Argument of Fascism
- Intelligence
- Power
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.
Karl Popper1902–1994The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method
- Science
By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human.
George Santayana1863–1952The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), p. 64
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
W. H. Auden1907–1973“In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, Another Time (1940)
- Ideas
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
Edith Sitwell1887–1964The Last Years of a Rebel (1967), p. 24
- Clever Jabs
- Intelligence
Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Peter Kropotkin1842–1921Letter to Vladimir Lenin (21 December 1920); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 426
- Ideas
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.
Claude Lévi-Strauss1908–2009Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 16: Markets, p. 148
The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.
Kahlil Gibran1883–1931Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud1896–1948Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)
- Genius
Imagination is a force of nature.
Saul Bellow1915–2005Henderson the Rain King (1959) [Viking/Penguin, 1984, ], ch. XVIII, p. 271
- Ideas
The most ignorant are the most conceited.
Horace Mann1796–1859Lectures on Education (1855), Lecture 6
- Intelligence
- Pride
It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful.
Anton LaVey1930–1997The Nine Satanic Sins (1987)
- Comedy
- Intelligence
Most of us seldom take the trouble to think.
Jawaharlal Nehru1889–1964The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937-1940 (1942), p. 94