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. 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
#5. 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
#6. Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus [to take control of a person].
Darrel Ray
#14. 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
#15. Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking in order to make your thinking better.
Richard W. Paul
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I learned the difference between critical thinking and being just plain critical.
Sarah Bessey
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Critical Thinking narrows and creative thinking expands, but they must work in tandem for problem solving and decision making.
Pearl Zhu
#27. The lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.
Carl Sagan
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.
Evgeny Morozov
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#35. 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
#36. There is nothing more Islamic than critical thinking.
Tariq Ramadan
#37. To even win a nomination in this country, you have to say you're a person of great faith. You have to pledge to the people out there that you put your faith in things that are unable to be proven - that you suspend critical thinking as the way to go.
Bill Maher
#38. Critical Thinking has the potential to be a deeply creative process.
Pearl Zhu
#39. This dramatic increase in the speed of information and the precipitous decline in critical thinking have been disastrous.
Bronwen Dickey
#40. The insecure leader will interpret critical thinking as critiscism.
Andy Stanley
#41. Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.
Amanda Ripley
#42. The most fundamental attack on freedom is the attack on critical thinking skills.
Travis Nichols
#43. All he did from freshman year through sophomore was react
sneer, laugh, dismiss, find fault, demean
a young man's version of critical thinking.
Toni Morrison
#44. Critical thinking is a lost 'art' that has yet to be found, if it is even being looked for.
R. Alan Woods
#45. I treat every student who walks through those doors the same because we are here to teach, if not political science, maybe a little something about critical thinking or even - gasp! - life. If students came to us fully formed and without insecurities, what would be the point?
Harlan Coben
#46. The lesson of Left Behind is a warning to repent the sin of critical thinking, which the fundamentalist, eager for people to embrace the Gospel of irrational nonsense, equates with intellectual pride.
Robert M. Price
#47. In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.
Katha Pollitt
#48. First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.
Carl Wilson
#49. Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.
Naomi Wolf
#50. Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured.
Nicholas Lemann
#51. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.
Brewster Kahle
#52. Where there is no critical thinking, there is no progress. If the children are our future, then critical thinking must be their guide.
Dale McGowan
#53. Much of education today focuses on obedience skills rather than critical thinking skills.
Bryant McGill
#54. Healthy debating enforces critical thinking principles - looking at things from the different angles, with increased perspective and less prejudgment.
Pearl Zhu
#55. In short, the liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#56. It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.
Adam Savage
#57. Holistic Thinking is a combination of analysis, Systems Thinking, and Critical Thinking
Pearl Zhu
#58. The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self- esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills.
Tom Flynn
#59. When a crowd adopts a point of view en masse, all critical thinking stops.
William Powers
#60. Wishful thinking is more valuable to an artist than critical thinking.
Marty Rubin
#61. In every circumstance, though the nation has liberated already and we have worked for the nation, or we have not, providing the foundation for critical thinking to the people is still important.
Khem Veasna
#62. In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education.
Russell Means
#63. Visionaries have the unique ability to dream of what's possible and then make it a reality. We are excited to watch these visionaries use technology to help students develop skills in collaboration, critical thinking and teamwork that they'll need to compete in the global economy.
Michael Dell
#64. [T]he downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.
Massimo Pigliucci
#65. Academic library collections are designed to support critical thinking, skepticism about the known, and curiosity about the unknown.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum
#66. Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with something better than what you planned on in the first place.
Mark Frauenfelder
#67. It takes critical thinking to frame the right problem and empathetic thinking to address the correct need.
Pearl Zhu
#68. Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business.
Richard Branson
#69. Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.
Jane Smiley
#70. Environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.
Richard Louv
#71. For students, the evolution-creation discussion can be a useful exercise, for it can help develop their critical thinking skills.
Ken Ham
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I think a critical part of being successful in our industry is having a beginner's mind
Marc Benioff
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
Maureen Corrigan
#81. 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
#82. If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
David Halberstam
#83. 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
#84. The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realize they can't do everything.
Kevin DeYoung
#85. A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
#86. 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
#87. Religions, themselves, are (intellectual) blasphemies.
Kedar Joshi
#88. A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#89. Asking questions were the most important thing.
Franz Kafka
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
Edward Abbey
#93. 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
#95. You must be able to say "I understand," before you can say "I agree," or "I disagree," or "I suspend judgment.
Mortimer J. Adler
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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