Quotes on Thinking for Yourself
Writers and thinkers on the hardest thing most people never do.
Nearly everyone who thinks seriously about anything will tell you they think for themselves. The opposite – parroting other people’s ideas and opinions – is widely derided on both the left and right, and one side will frequently accuse the other of repeating things they read in The New York Times or saw on a Tucker Carlson podcast.
The problem is that, to one degree or another, we all outsource our thinking and are influenced by ideas that are not our own. How could it be otherwise? The real measure of thinking for yourself, then, is perhaps the ability to change your mind, take the view that runs contrary to your group, not out of contrariness but because you’ve followed a thought a little further than is comfortable.
The writers and thinkers below understood this better than most.
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
— Bertrand Russell
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Even the lively debate within this spectrum gives the impression of free thinking, but all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate."
— Noam Chomsky
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
— Marcus Aurelius
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
— Oscar Wilde
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
— Christopher Hitchens
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.”
— Leo Tolstoy
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
— Upton Sinclair
“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”
— John Stuart Mill
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
— Galileo
“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
— George Orwell (attributed)
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”
— Albert Einstein
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By Frederick Alexander
The Gadfly looks at the ideas, institutions, and incentives behind our cultural confusion – who benefits, why it persists, and what it costs.
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