Quotes About Open-mindedness

don't be afraid of going by a way you've never gone - that's the way we're all going...

Creative geniuses are: 1.  Comfortable with uncertainty 2.  Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes 3.  Persistent

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.

Though we cannot expect to be able to think like they thought, or read their minds, or penetrate very deeply into so much that is opaque to us in their culture, we can begin to see that there are other ways of thinking besides our own and begin to identify some of the ways in which we have been presumptuously ethnocentric.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

G. K. Chesterton said that when a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing: he believes in anything.

Where once there seemed to be room to wonder, to speculate, to not know, there now seems to be increasing pressure for instant answers, immediate solutions, and narrowly defined results.

From the very beginning of my studying I made it a rule that whenever, in any matter, I heard a sounder viewpoint, I abandoned the one I had since I know well that we know far less than what we do not know.

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

We have to be tolerant of other people's points of view; we have to be able to disagree without being disagreeable, without claiming that we have a monopoly on the truth.

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

Don't judge a person till you've walked a mile in his shoes.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

Our prejudices are like physical infirmities — we cannot do what they prevent us from doing.

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.

Let not men think there is no truth but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read. To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to shew their darkness, but to put out our own eyes.

I mean that the more confident people are about their beliefs, the more likely they are to be wrong. It's the ones who are so certain, so black and white, the ones who never consider that they could be wrong or that anyone else could be right, they're the ones who scare me. When you're not confident at least you keep checking what you do and asking yourself if you're on the right track.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?

When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.