Quotes About Dogmatism

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post- Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.

Dogmatism does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.

Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!

There is nothing more terrifying than those who are certain that what they believe is undeniably true.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists--and I am inclined to think it is so--it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]

Perhaps we can think of fundamentalism as a stifling, an asphyxiation, and constipation of the soul.

The different Tantric schools, however, completely reject all formalism, dogmatism, puritanism, eviction of women, and existence of castes. They place the spiritual and mystical path in the social context by abolishing all differences between people.

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.

There is a crying need for the development of a new body of revolutionary theory that breaks decisively with the dogmatism and political shallowness of anarchism as well as with the authoritarian essence of marxism.

Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.

There is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into 'coteries' where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.

The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.

I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.

To be firm without a complementary flexibility is to be a corpse. Conservative self-confidence without a liberal broad-mindedness becomes chauvinism, pedantry.

I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.