Quotes About Open-mindedness

Il Canonico rispose che lui non era affatto d'idee larghe e che, per dire il vero, questo non gli dispiaceva, perché la larghezza d'idee spesso non era altro che superficialità.

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

You who are on the inside, don't condemn my lack of faith too quickly; you who are on the outside, don't be too quick to mock my overcredulity; you who are indifferent, don't be too quick to wax ironic about my perpetual hesitations.

Why should we expect her to be exactly like ourselves? Lucia went on. How can we be sure that our way is better than any other from A Fair Barbarian

If I knocked and waited at every door, who knows what I might miss?

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' That's from Emerson, by the way.

But I could be wrong.

My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out.

You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.

It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

If we're absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey—then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man.

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

We tend not to be especially critical when presented with evidence that seems to confirm our prejudices.

In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

Skepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

T]he going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high level [...] conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us.

There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted to not be sure.

the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.