Quotes About Open-mindedness

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.

I am not a planner. I follow. Tell me what to do and no man alive does it better. But my mind is like fine wine; it travels badly.

Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover-ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation—painful though they may be.

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.

we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.

I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

Fortunately, in real life, we are not in danger of these bizarre extremes unless we consciously work our way into them. I can see no situation in which I will be presented with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way.

My father wanted us to try everything and feel free to push the envelope. His attitude taught me to define failure as not trying something I want to do instead of not achieving the right outcome.

we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage. He called this tendency "what you see is all there is.

Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.

be polite and respectful to all and don't take sides.

Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what its told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.

What I hope we can learn is to be aware of how our beliefs color what we see." I wanted to tell Brittain that Lemry was trying

Like I said before, Rudy says, it's all about differences. Something about humans really doesn't like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares or angers you.

Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang. "I'm conservative", "I'm liberal", "I'm conservative". Bullshit! Be a fucking person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, okay? I've got some shit I'm conservative about, I've got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!

Anyone who makes up their mind about an issue before they hear the issue is a fool.

The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it's really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not.

It is arrogance to believe you can know all things. Perhaps you are right. But perhaps you are not.

The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance

we wouldn't offer our child just one kind of book if we wanted him to become an avid reader: we can learn how to do the same with food.