Aggressive Certainty

"I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them."
- Montaigne
...


Repeat after me, "I am not a thinker"

"Very few people think; a considerable number of people believe they think; and the rest would rather die than think."
- anonymous

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not entirely absurd, indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
- Bertrand Russell

"People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true."
 - Robert J. Ringer

"We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."
 - Denis Diderot

"What's the most offensive is not their lying-one can always forgive lying--lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth--what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.
 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others."
 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are."
- Anaïs Nin

"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity... We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton

"The taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly."
- Benjamin Franklin

"O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!"
 - Friedrich Nietzsche


But there is hope, we can become thinkers

"Ruin and recovery are both from within."
- Epictetus

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."
- Henry David Thoreau

"One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good"! The expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value. 
 - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Even people who aren't geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits."
 - Charlie Munger


If we just remember

"No one really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions."
 - Charles Steinmetz

"Fifty percent of what we know is wrong. The problem is that we do not know which 50% it is."
- Timothy Noakes

"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth."
 - Ludwig Börne

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."
- Miguel de Unamuno

"I care about the premises more than the theories, and I want to minimize reliance on theories, stay light on my feet, and reduce my surprises. I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"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

"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 Popper

"True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it."
- Karl Popper

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
 - Carl Jung

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
 - Marcel Proust

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
- Doris Lessing

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. [...] Never lose a holy curiosity."
 - Albert Einstein