Top 100 Quotes About Critical Thinking
#1. Critical thinking is essential to make sense of our world, especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us loudly that they know best. We need to be able to look at the evidence and work out whether we agree with them.
Helen Czerski
#2. Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.
Derek Bok
#3. The ability to reflect is associated with critical thinking and reasoning ability. And the capacity to be alone is one of the highest levels of development. It's important to know how to self-soothe and be confident of other people's love even when they're not there in front of you.
Laurie Helgoe
#4. Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Richard Dawkins
#5. I don't think all of my ideas are good. It's almost easier when people are critical of you because it helps with the quality control.
Seth Rogen
#6. Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A "critique," a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#7. There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level - forget about the media - than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap.
Alec Baldwin
#8. It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.
Bell Hooks
#9. I think a critical part of being successful in our industry is having a beginner's mind
Marc Benioff
#10. The day he is out of baseball will be the day he starts to think about what comes next. By then, it may be too late.
Jim Bouton
#11. Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]
Harper Lee
#12. 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.
Greil Marcus
#13. I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
Maureen Corrigan
#14. Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world's education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning.
Wendy Kopp
#15. Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#16. If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing)
Sting
#17. If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
David Halberstam
#18. The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Garry Kasparov
#19. Critical thinking requires reflection and analysis of various viewpoints. This does not mean that all positions are correct - not at all! This simply means that one should avoid willed ignorance, and instead carefully analyze all arguments.
Van Jacob E. Vleet
#20. There are always a few, Claire, who like being told what to do instead of being required to think. And those are the ones you should fear. That goes equally for humans, I'm afraid. Critical thinking has become a sadly rare skill these days.
Rachel Caine
#21. 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.
Darrel Ray
#22. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff.
Karl Popper
#23. These games create a space for us to play together and connect with our joy; they also develop imagination, confidence, critical thinking, trust, connection and understanding within groups
Hannah Fox
#24. The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realize they can't do everything.
Kevin DeYoung
#25. A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
#26. Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.
Derek Bok
#27. To think critically, it is first maturing and distancing a bit from self, no matter what level one lives on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Pearl Zhu
#28. Religions, themselves, are (intellectual) blasphemies.
Kedar Joshi
#29. A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#30. Asking questions were the most important thing.
Franz Kafka
#31. Cyber Command is supposed to be defending our critical infrastructure at home, but they are spending so much time looking at how to attack networks, how to break systems, and how to turn things off. I don't think it adds up as representing a defensive team.
Edward Snowden
#32. The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge.
Carl Sagan
#33. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
Edward Abbey
#34. You know, I don't believe that religions are religions. No, I believe they are philosophies with some good ideas and some fuckin' weird ones.
Eddie Izzard
#36. You must be able to say "I understand," before you can say "I agree," or "I disagree," or "I suspend judgment.
Mortimer J. Adler
#37. 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.
Stacy Feiner
#38. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
Carl Sagan
#39. We do not make very full value of the opportunities provided by technology because we prefer critical to constructive thinking, argument to design.
Edward De Bono
#40. Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus [to take control of a person].
Darrel Ray
#41. An individual affected by lower frequency waves, operates with a logic that doesn't necessarily solves a problem. It's a process that guides the mind without self-awareness or critical thinking.
Daniel Marques
#42. I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.
Christopher Hitchens
#43. The most critical case in a corporation, especially a big one, is when everything goes well, when you have accomplished your objectives. When the temptation is to work twice as hard instead of saying, "We have accomplished our objectives, we have to think again."
Peter Drucker
#44. Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking in order to make your thinking better.
Richard W. Paul
#45. You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.
Robert Greene
#46. Sunglasses are more useful to a blind man than freedom of speech is to a man who does not think for himself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#47. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills.
Carl Sagan
#48. A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.
Michael R. LeGault
#49. Critical thinking is one of our highest achievements besides eating with a fork, so when we emotionally can't get what we want, we have to think our way towards the resolution and this is where we crash and burn.
Ruby Wax
#50. I learned the difference between critical thinking and being just plain critical.
Sarah Bessey
#51. Job creation is important I think, but it's not the critical issue for Republicans.
Greg Gutfeld
#52. Although professors regard improving critical thinking as the most important goal of college, tests reveal that seniors who began their studies with average critical thinking skills have progressed only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen to about the 69th percentile.
Derek Bok
#53. Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#54. My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.
Bell Hooks
#55. Think independently and critically, but never forget to think with understanding and love.
Debasish Mridha
#56. Shouldn't children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn't we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?
Richard Dawkins
#57. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Richard Dawkins
#58. No Child Left Behind widens the gap between the races more than any piece of educational legislation I've seen in 40 years. It denies inner-city kids the critical-thinking skills to interrogate reality.
Jonathan Kozol
#59. In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.
Eugenie Scott
#61. I think that mentoring is such a critical part of the role I can play in my position. I see how little bits of exposure and big bits of exposure really change my girls significantly, and I want that for more girls around the country and the world.
Michelle Obama
#62. We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill ... it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.
Li Ka-shing
#64. Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#65. The capacity to innovate - the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life - and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.
Tony Wagner
#66. Analysis Is the Critical Starting Point of Strategic Thinking
Kenichi Ohmae
#67. Critical Thinking narrows and creative thinking expands, but they must work in tandem for problem solving and decision making.
Pearl Zhu
#68. As I wrote more I became more critical of myself and I think that you have to be your harshest judge. I don't ever believe that what I write is my best work. I always think that I can hone it. I can always think that I can make it a little bit better.
Homer Hickam
#69. I do not need any cheerleaders at my moot court. And I cannot imagine walking into that Court without the preparation of a few vicious moot courts; it is critical to the development of my thinking.
Patricia Millett
#70. Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself
thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.
Henrik Ibsen
#71. The lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.
Carl Sagan
#72. 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.
George Orwell
#73. 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.
John C. Bean
#74. 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
Bell Hooks
#75. Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'
David Harsanyi
#76. Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.
Frank Herbert
#77. The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.
Jim Fowler
#78. Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.
Evgeny Morozov
#79. I don't think you can say that feminism has made women critical of marriage because women have been critical of marriage for centuries.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#80. 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.
Anna Valdiserri
#81. No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.
Peter Slezak
#82. Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
Stefan Molyneux
#83. If you're not critical about your history, that can be a problem because there are religious leaders, politicians and all kinds of powerful people who can take advantage of a population that isn't really thinking.
Jose Gonzalez
#84. P33- Oppression 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.
Paulo Freire
#85. She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.
David Halberstam
#86. We think in terms of fate even if we don't believe in it. Even something as trivial as missing the bus - we think: Well, it might be good for something. We always have that thought, no matter how critical we try to be. The idea that everything is always total chance - we're not made for that.
Daniel Kehlmann
#87. One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.
Lucy Corin
#88. One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".
Andrew Roberts
#89. Not only is true love rare and true rebellion rare, real love is itself a radical form of rebellion - engagement, thinking, and being - and therefore happens in the context of a larger project of justice, liberation, and critical thinking.
Masha Tupitsyn
#90. I think forgiveness is a release of emotions, a release to say "No I let go". I think it is critical for our mental health being and our physical health being and I think it is critical for our universal being as well to forgive each other.
John Assaraf
#91. Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the invaluable mental power we call judgment.
Sam Wineburg
#92. We have to start with the little babies who are born now, socialize them in freedom and critical thinking. We don't have to throw away their faith. People confuse the two, thinking if you are enlightened that means apostasy. It doesn't.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#93. On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
#94. ...when we cease asking questions, when we stop being self-critical, and when we no longer engage with others, then we surrender our ability to grow--to progress. Let's begin the conversation.
Mehdi Ghafourifar
#95. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality.
Charlie Brooker
#96. I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#97. Whenever we hear an opinion and believe it, we make an agreement, and it becomes part of our belief system.
Miguel Ruiz
#98. I have a positive core, and what I'm doing for music and Earth and the people is more living and less critical thinking.
Lil B
#99. The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.
Tom Heehler
#100. If you replace a soldier with a machine, you take away the possibility of the soldier or the policeman to not do something the state asks of him. He may think it's unethical to do it. A machine doesn't have that critical perspective.
Jose Padilha
