Søren Kierkegaard on independent thinking

The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong.  The person who's right often has to stand alone. 

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Joel Tillinghast on independent thinking

On the whole, students with high grade point averages achieve them through curiosity and diligence, but it's also possible to get high marks by gaming the system, sucking up to professors, and regurgitating whatever they want to hear.  In investing, where doing nothing often prevents blunders, a certain style of laziness is adaptive, but mental laziness isn't, and not thinking independently is absolutely toxic.  The entire game is about figuring out what others have missed.  The largest prizes go to those who think differently and correctly.  Some investing ideas will look stupid or crazy, and a few will be, but the alternative is mediocrity.  Depending on the results, you will be called courageous, or arrogant and foolhardy.  Don't be ashamed of error, only of failing to correct it.

~ Joel Tillinghast, Big Money Thinks Small, p. 41

Albert Einstein on authority

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~ Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
1979

Bretigne Shaffer on the cult of mainstream America

Somehow, the culture that I live in has come to be characterized by an outright disdain for independent thought.  Public debate has been largely reduced to the pitting of competing authority figures against each other, and the capacity of most people to engage in reasoned argument begins and ends with an appeal to those authorities.  Only a very few seem able to engage directly with information themselves, and those few are largely ignored. 

We have arrived at a point in history where the intellectual norm is now to abandon one’s own capacity for reason and to put in its place a collection of authority figures and institutions. Or rather, authority itself.

We have arrived at a point in history where mainstream America looks very much like a cult.

~ Bretigne Shaffer, "Letter to my Grandchildren from Inside a Cult," LewRockwell.com, November 18, 2020

Frederick Douglass on critical thinking and slavery

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.

~ Frederick Douglass

George Orwell on indoctrination

These two had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers, they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals by simple arguments.

~ George Orwell, Animal Farm

Thomas Sowell on educating the younger generation

We're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. And they are being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint and more important, to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. 

~ Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institute interview, 7:50 mark, posted on YouTube September 18, 2020

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. on independent thinking

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear the less the label of ‘crack-pot’ than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

~ Thomas J. Watson, Jr. president of IBM from 1952-1971

Humphrey Neill on the difference between the crowd and individual

The crowd thinks with its heart; the individual thinks with his brain.

~ Humphrey Neill

Winston Churchill on independent thinking

When you’re 20 you care what everyone thinks, when you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place. You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

~ Winston Churchill

Marcus Aurelius and ignoring the noise

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

~Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher