Top 74 Quotes About Dogmatism
#1. Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.
Neil Postman
#2. Dogmatism grew from the soil of simplistic and frequently wrong concepts. Dogmatism is like a ship that has run aground: the waves run, the ship stays put, but the impression of movement persists
Dmitri Volkogonov
#3. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.
William James
#4. True politeness is consideration for the opinions of others. It has been said of dogmatism that it is only puppyism come to its full growth; and certainly the worst form this quality can assume is that of opinionativeness and arrogance.
Samuel Smiles
#5. An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.
Peter Sloterdijk
#6. Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.
Beatrice Webb
#7. Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.
Roberto Bolano
#8. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.
Dalai Lama
#9. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.
Frans De Waal
#10. Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
Stephen Jay Gould
#11. The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.
Sam Harris
#12. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
Thomas Sowell
#13. Certainty closes many doors," he replied. "It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards.
Jo Walton
#14. It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it ... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression.
Joyce Cary
#16. Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
Sidney Hook
#18. The world is so full of possibilities that dogmatism is simply indecent.
Albert Einstein
#19. Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition ... [and therefore] 'On to God!
Max Planck
#20. It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.
Sam Harris
#21. It is not that religion is merely useless, it is mischievous. It is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises.
Frances Wright
#22. Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Robert Kennedy
#23. Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?
Michel De Montaigne
#24. The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#25. For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
Aldous Huxley
#26. We need some heterodoxy in social science in order for them to avoid death by suffocation under dogmatism.
Bourdieu, Pierre
#27. Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.
Rodney Stark
#28. What am I to choose? "Choose what you please, as long as you choose." There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant.
Michel De Montaigne
#29. I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.
Virginia Woolf
#30. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#31. In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
Ronald Fisher
#32. It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.
Nanamoli Thera
#34. Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism ... the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.
Henry Seidel Canby
#35. The self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
#36. While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.
Sam Harris
#38. Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor
Immanuel Kant
#40. The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
William Osler
#41. Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.
Bertrand Russell
#42. Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance - embracing all opposites.
Taisen Deshimaru
#44. The history of science alone can keep the physicist from the mad ambitions of dogmatism as well as the despair of pyrrhonian scepticism.
Pierre Duhem
#45. Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It's also a dead give-away that the person doesn't know why he believes what he believes.
Bob Altemeyer
#46. But dogmatism - or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking" - is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]
Leo Strauss
#47. Dogmatism increases in direct proportion to a person's inability to prove a point.
Donald J. Walters
#48. Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It's thinking with your mind wide shut.
Bob Altemeyer
#49. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. Lord, give me firmness without hardness, steadfastness without dogmatism, love without weakness.
Jim Elliot
#51. Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism.
Sextus Empiricus
#52. Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.
{Letter to his son and 6th US president, John Quincy Adams, November 13 1816}
John Adams
#53. The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.
Paul Ricoeur
#54. To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil.
Ambrose Bierce
#55. For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism.
Alister E. McGrath
#56. In the world everyone knows enough to pursue what he does not know, but no one knows enough to pursue what he already knows. Everyone knows enough to condemn what he takes to be no good, but no one knows enough to condemn what he has already taken to be good.
Zhuangzi
#57. No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth
Blaise Pascal
#58. A man could be dogmatic, and that was all right, or he could be stupid, and no harm done, but stupid and dogmatic at the same time was too much, especially fluxed with body odor.
Terry Pratchett
#59. Truth is independent of all dogmas, ancient or modern.
Abhijit Naskar
#60. The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher
Gregory B. Sadler
#61. If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
Terry Eagleton
#62. Truth doesn't pay homage to creeds. Creeds must adjust themselves to be compatible with the truth.
Abhijit Naskar
#63. Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl Popper
#64. Every side attacks you when you don't take sides.
Marty Rubin
#66. If we seek the truth without realizing how far we are from it, we will be dogmatists. If we realize how far we are from the truth but do not seek it, we will be skeptics. If we both seek the truth and realize how far we are from it, we will be wise.
Peter Kreeft
#67. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
Thomas Jefferson
#68. There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side.
Oscar Levant
#69. Fanatics are like debris following the course of the wind, they are swept around like sand, and convinced to believe in what they do not understand.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#71. Experience God, don't raise a wall of dogmas between you and Him.
Stefan Emunds
#72. We have to get over the idea that there's some right way to live.
Marty Rubin
#73. [S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.
Nel Noddings
#74. It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.
Earl Weaver
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