How to Think Quotes

“all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we’re right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings. Thinking independently, solitarily, “for ourselves,” is not an option.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“There’s a famous and often-told story about the great economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?”
― Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

“By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.”
― Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

“there are ways to be dishonest that fall short of actual lying.”
― Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

“Robinson’s analysis. People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted.”
― Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

“In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent. Such people are immensely dangerous, and for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“A good book is like a mirror: If a donkey looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“If you were to find yourself suddenly and completely isolated from your whole social circle because you no longer believe something that all of them believe, you wouldn’t be any less lonely because you could mutter to yourself that they weren’t real friends after all. You might even come to think that not-real friends are better than no friends at all.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves;”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate;”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“I know what it’s like to make common cause with people who are in some ways alien to me; I know how such experiences can expand my understanding of the world; I know how they can force me to confront the narrowness of my vision and my tendency to simplistic thinking—sometimes to not thinking at all.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.” The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“Eliot’s conclusion—“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*”
― Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

“So let me conclude this chapter with a celebration of splitting--of the disciplined, principled preference for rejecting categories whenever we discern them at work. Again, this is not to say that we can live without them, but rather that we need to cultivate skepticism as a first response. The group solidarity matters to almost all of us in one way or another--it is the stuff of which both inner rings and genuine membership are made--on some fundamental level, as Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.” The key word there is always: to be “reckoned...as a member of a class” Is sometimes useful, often necessary, but intolerably offensive as a universal practice.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“A hundred years ago G. K. Chesterton wrote, “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“讓我們當中某些人覺得不舒服的是，SNOOT對於當代語言用法的態度，很類似宗教／政治保守份子面對當代文化的態度。我們有一種傳教士似的狂熱，以及一種近乎神經質的信心，相信我們的信念很重要，並結合了一種壞脾氣臭老頭覺得事事每下愈況的絕望，看著英語被理應識字的大人一再地糟蹋……我們是少數，我們是驕傲的人，基本上總覺得其他所有人都不成體統。”
― 亞倫．傑考布斯 (Alan Jacobs), 冷思考

“瓦特．夸特羅喬奇（Walter Quattrociocchi）、安東尼奧．史卡拉（Antonio Scala）與凱斯．桑斯坦（Cass R. Sunstein）最近合著的文章〈臉書同溫層〉（Echo Chambers on Facebook）提出某些很強的論據，證明這個問題是真實存在且棘手的。”
― 亞倫．傑考布斯 (Alan Jacobs), 冷思考

“我們還必須能夠對我們的知識狀態作出可靠的評估，必要時可以暫且不採取任何立場，直到自己知道更多為止。”
― 亞倫．傑考布斯 (Alan Jacobs), 冷思考