Dogmatism Quotes

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
― Karl Popper

“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

{Letter to his son and 6th US president, John Quincy Adams, November 13 1816}”
― John Adams , The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. I: 1920-1925

“Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.”
― Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life

“All the systems which explain so precisely why the world is as it is and why it can never be otherwise, have always called forth in me the same kind of uneasiness one has when face to face with the regulations displayed under the glaring lights of a prison cell. Even if one had been born in prison and had never seen the stars or seas or woods, one would instinctively know of timeless freedom in unlimited space.

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable where in fashion.... "Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Centre; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed" - we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again in five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“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.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

“Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.”
― John C. Eccles, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind

“Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It's thinking with your mind wide shut.”
― Bob Altemeyer

“Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Ist eine Lehre zur Satzung erstarrt, hat sie geendet.”
― Lao Tse

“...a man could be dogmatic, and that was all right, or he could be stupid, and no harm done, but stupid and dogmatic at the same time was too much, especially fluxed with body odor.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“The moment a person loses the capacity to think, to question, Tanya considers them no longer human but a machine. And that is why the individual Tanya Degurechaff reveres thought, loves debate, and sneers at dogmatism from the bottom of her heart.”
― Carlo Zen, 幼女戦記 (1) Deus lo vult

“Something else changed when querinalo changed. Our immortality began to become—it is difficult to explain. None of us began to age, nor did we lose our vitality. Rather it was as if what was resilient within us began to stiffen. Traits of character became not merely habits, but defining elements. I suppose for me that it was fortunate — or unfortunate, given my current situation as your prisoner — that one of my defining traits has always been curiosity. Curiosity is one of the seeds of creativity, so that remained to me as well, but many of my associates were less fortunate.
"Remember that Virim recruited us all because we shared a certain idealism. However, I fear that not much time needs to pass for idealism to become dogmatism. This was the case for many of my associates. They became dogmatic, but not regarding the same things."
Firekeeper wondered what dogs had to do with ideas, but thought she understood. Dogs, like wolves, were pack animals, but unlike wolves, dogs retained a juvenile desire to follow. So these spellcasters had been Virim's dogs, and when this stiffening happened, they had become even more doglike. It made sense in a way.”
― Jane Lindskold, Wolf's Blood

“What kind of a moron demands his devotee to slaughter his son just to prove his loyalty! What kind of an alcoholic father sends his son to be tortured and nailed on a cross just to prove how much he cares! What kind of a pervert rescues his wife from her abductor only to abandon her, just so his reputation as the ideal king wouldn't be tarnished by a violated woman! Mythologies have nothing to do with holiness, nor with the actual creator of the cosmos, even if there is such a thing, at most they reflect the mindset and morality of their time.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Dogma not divine, myth not holy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Mythologies have nothing to do with holiness, nor with the actual creator of the cosmos, even if there is such a thing, at most they reflect the mindset and morality of their time.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“God's original name is Human,
but it isn't very profitable,
so the apes cook up fancy names,
and sprinkle in tales of magic.

Organized religion is the planet's largest circus,
where apes commodify divinity to sell tickets -
more divide means more fear, means more control,
divine distant from human is the holy grail of commerce.

Human is the first and final name of divinity,
but that goes against the entire religious
industrial complex - for the purpose of brevity
I say religious, but I mean fundamentalist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“God’s original name is Human, but it isn’t very profitable, so the apes cook up fancy names, and sprinkle in tales of magic.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Organized religion is the planet’s largest circus, where apes commodify divinity to sell tickets – more divide means more fear, means more control, divine distant from human is the holy grail of commerce.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Organized religion is the planet’s largest circus, where apes commodify divinity to sell tickets.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“More divide means more fear, means more control, divine distant from human is the holy grail of commerce.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“La risa mata al miedo, y sin miedo no puede haber fe, porque sin miedo al diablo ya no hay necesidad de Dios.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Truth follows the belief, humanize the belief, and truth becomes human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace