Quotes About Open-mindedness

We judge others based on our love level. When we are full of love we have no room left for judgment.

Must you believe everything you are taught? Must you hate because someone told you to?

Scottish philosopher William Drummond, read: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot reason is a fool; he who dares not reason is a slave.

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion? 3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST

That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that "feels unsafe"), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).

And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness

sesgo de confirmación-, la tendencia a buscar e interpretar nuevas pruebas de formas que confirmen lo que uno piensa. A las personas se les da muy bien cuestionar las afirmaciones hechas por otros, pero cuando se trata de su creencia, entonces es su posesión, casi como una hija, y en ese caso lo que quieren es protegerla, no cuestionarla y arriesgarse a perderla.

Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.

Marcel Proust wrote that "the only true voyage . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes."41

people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly."22

If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own."50 It's such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode.

This is how the press secretary works on trivial issues where there is no motivation to support one side or the other. If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion

It's people who don't think who sink into bigotry.

You probably won't understand this precisely now, but knowledge and experience not only shapes people—it can also wall them off. Once they believe they have figured it all out, acquired a worldview and come to trust their choices to an overarching meta-narrative, anything which questions that set of operating premises is perceived as a nuisance—if not an outright threat.

The world is bigger and harder to understand than you think... You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

People should be allowed to believe what they want to believe. If some of us have seen things that make us question the limits of the world and the possibilities of a larger world, then that's on us. It's ours to consider. To fear or not to fear as we each choose.

Fiction has no right answers, and reading fiction is not about getting things right.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.

A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand. Not only do most religions not do this.

My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.

Free your mind, and the rest will follow. Be colorblind, don't be so shallow.