Quotations

Dialogue is difficult to describe to persons who haven't experienced this qualitatively different mode of conversation. But the following quotations help to suggest some of the attitudes and habits of mind which support a high level of dialogue; they also suggest why we might find such a conversation to be so satisfying.

"A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!"

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

- Socrates

"Any fool can come up with the right answers. But the real measure of wisdom is coming up with the right questions."

- Swami Beyondananda

"Change your thoughts and you change the world."

- Norman Vincent Peale

"The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priests had said, 'Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought.' The Greeks said, 'All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits on thought.'"

- Edith Hamilton

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking."

- Martin H. Fischer

"It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think."

- Eugene Ionesco

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking."

- Alfred Korzybski

"Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think."

- Dale Carnegie

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

- George Bernard Shaw

"Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much."

- Walter Lippman

"It is not best that we should all think alike; it is differences of opinion which makes horse races."

- Mark Twain

"The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors."

- John Stuart Mill

"People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things."

- Buckminster Fuller

"Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one to ask why."

- Bernard M. Baruch

"The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on Earth."

- Norman Cousins

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."

- Henry Ford

"Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught."

- Winston Churchill

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."

- Mark Van Doren

"A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell where his influence stops."

- Henry Adams

"In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message . . . the drawing out, not the pumping in."

- Ashley Montagu

"You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives."

- Clay P. Bedford

"Learn to reason forward and backward on both sides of a question."

- Thomas Blandi

"Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do."

- James Harvey Robinson

"He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave."

- Sir William Drummond

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

- Thomas Jefferson

"The important thing is not to stop questioning."

- Albert Einstein

"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more. Doubt is thought, and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought."

- Albert Guerard

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