Quotes About Thought

When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.

Bruce Friedman,

And when we hand down our habits of thought to our children, through the examples we set, the schooling we provide, and the media we use, we hand down as well the modifications in the structure of our brains.

The "chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought" can, writes Mitchell,

In Google's world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought.

There will always be a war between light and darkness, between science and superstition, between education and ignorance. Ignorance is easier. It requires no study. Faith is the enemy of thought.

In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.

What one repeatedly finds in Derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all of his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happens to be at issue. 'Deconstruction' is perhaps the best-known word for this.

To the stalled mind, the present stage will always seem advanced. To the free mind, the present stage will always seem elementary.

truth of Orwell's remark that 'So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

here is the second large point, to go through The Satanic Verses with the squinting eye of a censor searching for thought crimes, or even to seek to see it in the round, as I have tried to do, is to blind yourself to the real reason why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the Dreyfus Affair of our age.

She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her snakestone over and over. She found it helped her think.

That's…" "An excellent idea. I do have them sometimes. Yes. Now go.

In order not to think of the world which science describes, man gets drunk on technology.

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.

Unnütz, jemandem einen Gedanken erklären zu wollen, dem eine Anspielung nicht genügt.

Voor de democraat staat vrijheid niet gelijk aan alles kunnen zeggen wat je denkt, maar aan niet over alles hoeven nadenken wat je zegt.

Legal freedom of expression has grown alongside the sociological enslavement of thought.

Precision in philosophy is a false elegance. On the other hand, literary precision is the foundation of aesthetic achievement.

Reactionary thought has been accused of irrationalism because it refuses to sacrifice the canons of reason to the prejudices of the day. The root of reactionary thought is not distrust of reason but distrust of the will.

Der authentische Atheismus hat für die menschliche Intelligenz den gleichen Stellenwert wie die Unendlichkeit für die Vorstellungskraft.

Entweder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Hegels, oder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Schopenhauers. Tertium non datur.

Marxism and psychoanalysis have been the two traps of the modern intelligence.

Thinking corrupts the imbecile.