Intellectual Honesty Quotes

“Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.
When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature

“My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.”
― J.B.S. Haldane, Faith And Fact

“Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”
― George Orwell

“Given the current pace of its corporatization, academia may well become the worst institution for indoctrinating and subjugating many brilliant minds that may otherwise have great potential for dissidence and creating a new worldview, which is much needed amid the global turmoil we are experiencing internationally.”
― Louis Yako

“I have faith, but I have faith in human reason”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I will say a few words about the connection of love and intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a sentamentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

“Noi non possiamo essere imparziali. Possiamo essere soltanto intellettualmente onesti: cioè renderci conto delle nostre passioni, tenerci in guardia contro di esse e mettere in guardia i nostri lettori contro i pericoli della nostra parzialità. L’imparzialità è un sogno, la probità è un dovere.”
― Gaetano Salvemini

“I don’t want people to think like me. I just want people to think.”
― Tomi Lahren, Never Play Dead: How the Truth Makes You Unstoppable

“We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Clause.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting’s sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.”
― René Descartes

“The summum bonum of human existence is not just the development of the intellect. It is transcending the intellect too. It is delving into and answering the question: Is there a reality beyond it all? Can epistemology unfold ontology?”
― Dr Janki Santoke, How Do You Know What You Know?: Manage Thoughts, Manage Life

“Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. That means that you intend to live by, to practice, an idea you accept as true”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

“If you want to influence a country’s intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case. Knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action.

What is required is honesty - intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction”
― Ayn Rand