Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Category: knowledge
Use it or lose it
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Reject appeals to authority
The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth … It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths.
Science vs. consensus
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
Curb your shame
If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies … It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.
Who are you going to believe?
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Check your assumptions
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Making the best use of knowledge
[David] Hume and [Friedrich] Hayek stressed the limited nature and impermanence of knowledge. Hayek observed that knowledge is not concentrated in a single authority but dispersed across the population. A free and open society, with capitalistic institutions of private property and enforceable contracts, uses knowledge better than central planning. A free society enables a better balance of conflicting objectives and the achievement of objectives with less sacrifice of other wants.
Adminicles
Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge.
Today’s corporate press
Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change.