Quotes About Open-mindedness

The country needs, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. Take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.

people with different ideas from one's own were not the enemy; they were simply people with different ideas. Hearing them out carried, he supposed, some small potential for having one's mind changed, but it was far more likely to strengthen the opinion you already had, so why all the fear?

She wanted to go on food tours of the Lower East Side, guided history walks in Tribeca, gospel brunches in Harlem, all of those things native (or at least "established") New Yorkers tended to turn up their noses at, preferring to maintain a smug ignorance about their city.

You know," Sybylla said warmly, "it isn't such a terrible thing to be incapable of open-mindedness. All of us are swayed by our experiences, and by prejudices. If the school bully who beat you up had red hair, then maybe there's a tiny part of you that resents people with red hair, even though you may know this to be irrational.

I take life as it happens. And I give myself a lot of freedom.

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

younger generations have a more international mindset

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

There is nothing less scientific than to deny something because it cannot be explained.

The language of elitism smells bad! It is not healthy to believe that we are the only ones to have captured truth and even less healthy to condemn others.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

A person who thought he knew everything simply didn't understand how much there was to know.

We are intelligent not because we can do one thing particularly well, but because we can learn to do practically anything.

We are liberal and tolerant because we are prosperous.

People who have strong likes and dislikes find life very difficult; they are as rigid as if they had only one bone.

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.

You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas — better to write down what refutes and weakens them!

Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.

Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still:Not yet.

You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.

Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet.