Critical Thinking Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." Think critically, and you will be all that you can be. Here are some things you can do to enhance your critical thinking. Clarify your thinking. Don’t be satisfied with a vague or fuzzy understanding of things. Don’t take things at face value.  Seek the real meaning of things by looking at not just the surface, but below the surface as well. Apply and refine your intellectual standards.  Judge things according to your personal standards, social standards, and professional standards. Keep an open mind.  You will not be able to think critically if you approach things with a rigid set of opinions and attitudes that are not open to discussion.  Utilize observation and inference, but place a high value on objective reality.  To be productive, your thinking must accurately perceive and interpret reality.  Do not rush to judgment.  Withhold judgment about things until you are certain you have enough information with which to make an informed judgment.  This is another way of saying “don’t jump to conclusions.” Stick to the point when you are thinking something through.  Don’t jump about without any logical connections between your thoughts.  Stay focused on what is relevant. Be intellectually curious.  Learn about things you don’t know much about and explore new ways of looking at and doing things. Don’t let your emotions get in the way of your thinking.  It’s difficult to think critically when you are angry or upset.  You will do your clearest thinking when you are calm and in control. Be a good listener.  The better you listen, the more correct information you will have, and the better decisions you will make. Don’t simply jump on the bandwagon.  It is tempting to embrace ideas that become popular.  However, this is conformity, not critical thinking.

Quotes About Critical Thinking

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

(Closing statement of the debate with William Dembski at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas, November 18, 2010)”
― Christopher Hitchens

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the small fly which has landed on it! Why do you do such a thing?”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Whenever we hear an opinion and believe it, we make an agreement, and it becomes part of our belief system.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question-Why We Suffer

“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
― Stephen King, On Writing

“Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books 

“If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity”
― Josh Lanyon, Come Unto These Yellow Sands

“The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.”
― Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic

“It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.”
― Bell Hooks, Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems

“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.”
― Carl Sagan

“Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking in order to make your thinking better.”
― Richard Paul

“Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.”
― Jamie Whyte, Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling / Repetition

“If we are not prepared to think for ourselves, and to make the effort to learn how to do this well, we will always be in danger of becoming slaves to the ideas and values of others due to our own ignorance.”
― William Hughes

“Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“I am heartened to find so much wit in you, that you'd give thought to consequences and choose your way with reason, not passion only.”
― Deborah J. Lightfoot, The Wysard

“Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”
― Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

“One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.”
― Bell Hooks, Talking About a Revolution: Interviews with Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid, and Howard Zinn

“For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.”
― Jim Al-Khalili

“If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast."

(History Will Teach Us Nothing)”
― Sting, Nothing Like the Sun

“If you don't understand how the world works, then everything is a mystery to you. If everything is magical and mysterious, then you really don't work on logic anymore. Then, everything is all about belief.”
― Joy Reidenberg

“It was around this time that I started thinking about how skin color defined class. The cowboy movies that fueled the goodness of ‘White’ reinforced attaching ‘darkness’ to a class. I finally took notice that the crayon color called ‘flesh’ did not match mine.”
― Luis Quiros, An Other's Mind

“Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.”
― Martin Baker

“In a world where critical thinking skills are almost wholly absent, repetition effectively leapfrogs the cognitive portion of the brain. It helps something get processed as truth. We used to call it unsubstantiated buy-in. Belief without evidence. It only works in a society where thinking for one's self is discouraged. That's how we lost our country.”
― Laura Bynum, VeracityQuotes tagged as "critical-thinking" (showing 31-60 of 3,000)

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”
― George Carlin

“If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.”
― Penn Jillette

“Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”
― Thomas Bernhard

“If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.”
― George Orwell

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
― Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol 2

“If 'truth' is an 'unveiled reality,' then my truth may not be your truth yet!”
― Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power

“Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the things they dislike (notably religion) and refusing to apply their skepticism to the things they do like (notably Darwinism). On two occasions I’ve urged Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, to put me on its editorial board as the resident skeptic of Darwinism. Though Shermer and I know each other and are quite friendly, he never got back to me about joining his editorial board.”
― William A. Dembski

“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".”
― Andrew Roberts

“Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it’s all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a “useful” or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results.”
― Henry Doss

“We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.”
― Arne Tiselius

“The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.”
― Bryant McGill

“[W]e have an automatic tendency to pay attention to or seek out information that is in agreement with (confirms) our preconceptions, and to ignore, distort or avoid information that contradicts (disconfirms) our preconceptions, a tendency that is called the confirmation bias. The confirmation bias serves to maintain and strengthen the beliefs that we already hold by causing us to automatically (that is, without being aware that we are doing so) perceive and remember experiences that confirm these beliefs, and to ignore or reinterpret those that disconfirm them. Because we tend to seek out only confirming evidence, our beliefs over time become so well confirmed in our minds that we come to think of them as “obviously true." In order to avoid the confirmation bias, we must force ourselves to look for evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.”
― Wadsworth Publishing

“Critical thinking is a lost 'art' that has yet to be found, if it is even being looked for".”
― R. Alan Woods, Apologia: A Collection of Christian Essays

“If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.
-From a speech by the president of Mount Holyoke College, as reported in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 13, 1938”
― Francis Beauchesne Thornton, How to Improve Your Personality by Reading

“La scuola può educare allo spirito del dialogo non solo in quanto ponga la riflessione su di esso al centro del suo contenuto didattico, ma anche e soprattutto attraverso una diversa via, che le è peculiare. Nella scuola meritevole di questo nome non soltanto si studia la civiltà del dialogo. La si mette in atto: e quindi ci si allena progressivamente ad essa. Il cattivo maestro insegna predicando: il buon maestro conversa e discute con i suoi scolari, perfino quando spiega le cose meno controvertibili, come certe lezioni elementari di aritmetica o di grammatica.”
― Guido Calogero, Logo e dialogo; saggio sullo spirito critico e sulla libertà di coscienza

“Critical thinking is a necessary and vital skill".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]”
― R. Alan Woods

“A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“Creating consent (hegemony) is never a simple act. It is rather the result of the social structures and the cultural patterns that dictates for each group its behavior and for each institutions its practices.”
― Amine Zidouh

“a large-scale policy mandating a mono-cultural curriculum – focused on teaching to the job may very well create a society of trained workers; but it will fail at creating a learning society. If we want to maintain a position of being inventive and vibrant and robust, we need an inventive, vibrant and robust educational philosophy. Just as teaching to the test distorts the learning process in ways that are often directly in opposition to the desired outcomes of the test, a teaching policy aimed at jobs alone may very well end up destroying jobs, or at the very least compromising a truly innovative culture.”
― Henry Doss

“The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

“Vi har noen rettigheter, plikter og verdier vi tar som en selvfølge. Men også selvfølgelighetene må begrunnes og forsvares. De oppleste og vedtatte sannhetene har godt av å bli utfordret, ikke minst for å gi oss anledning til å lese dem opp og vedta dem på nytt.”
― Trine Skei Grande, Ytringsfrihet: 10 essays

“Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.”
― William Graham Sumner

“Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.”
― Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

“(...)the question of the Jews has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion. If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable forms.”
― Henry Ford, The International Jew - The World's Foremost Problemikes

Quotes tagged as "critical-thinking" (showing 61-65 of 3,000)

“Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]”
― Harper Lee

“There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.”
― James Randi

“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.

Frank Schaeffer”
― Frank Schaeffer

“Believe what you like, but don't believe everything you read without questioning it.”
― Pauline Baynes, Questionable Creatures: A Bestiary

“Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht mir, sondern einem anderen Schüler, mit den Worten: "Ich werde dir deine Karriere schon verderben!" Am gleichen Tag las ich bei Storm den Spruch: "Was du immer kannst, zu werden, scheue Arbeit nicht und Wachen, aber hüte deine Seele vor dem Karrieremachen.”
― Thomas Mann, Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften