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ad5efe7
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Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
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indoctrination
critical-thinking
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Richard Dawkins |
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ec69311
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When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
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politics
religion
inspirational
critical-thinking
dogma
freedom-of-thought
independent-thought
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Anaïs Nin |
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a45de34
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When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
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writing
revisions
critical-thinking
editing
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Stephen King |
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474864a
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"Now, 75 years [after ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
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reading
vacuity
modern-life
superficiality
critical-thinking
computers
communication
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Harper Lee |
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ae69dcc
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You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.
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freedom
empowerment
critical-thinking
social-order
defiance
dissent
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Naomi Wolf |
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276517f
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One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness - in communities, in institutions, among friends.
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critical-thinking
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bell hooks |
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0d2ece0
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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 faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
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enlightenment
progress
irony
lies
socialism
literature
humanism
politics
faith
religion
science
truth
apoliticism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
eurocentricism
george-hw-bush
german-people
groupthink
left-wing-politics
margaret-thatcher
munich
personality-politics
polytheism
potus
radical-politics
tribalism
xhosa-people
zulu-people
ronald-reagan
sectarianism
monotheism
solipsism
argument
critical-thinking
self-pity
self-love
south-africa
totalitarianism
journalism
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
soviet-union
united-states
conviction
orthodoxy
los-angeles
film
individualism
atheism
hedonism
thomas-mann
populism
russia
communism
postmodernism
cold-war
germany
literary-criticism
euphemism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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8ce8053
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Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking - and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.
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critical-thinking
randomness
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Steven Johnson |
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3b637e7
|
When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. [...] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.
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reality
philosophy
truth
critical-examination
depiction
critical-thinking
marketing
logic
speech
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Harry G. Frankfurt |
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bca19fe
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Reading has not gone out of fashion in the last number of years, nor in the ones while you slept in the asteroid belt. Your relatives do not wish to expose themselves to deep thought, lest they be affected by it.
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reading
critical-thinking
thought
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Anne McCaffrey |