Thinker Quotes - Page 21

• What I notice about people who are gifted in filmmaking is that they're great thinkers. They engage with big ideas and they engage with people.

  Ben Whishaw

  Ideas, People, Bigs

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

  Robert Graves

  Independent, Civilization, Long

  Robert Graves (2011). “The White Goddess”, p.361, Faber & Faber

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• Certainly the research shows that grateful people are more innovative thinkers.

  Deborah Norville

  Grateful, People, Research

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• Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

  Bell Hooks

  Men, Color, Males

  bell hooks (2012). “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, p.239, Routledge

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• We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

  Bill Maher

  Country, Sheep, People

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• My engineering training taught me to be a systems thinker. I looked at companies as "systems" and saw work as a system of tasks - that needed to be reengineered. I was also focused on operations, getting things done and built. My engineering training taught me to be a pragmatist.

  James A. Champy

  Training, Done, Focused

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• Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

  Susan Cain

  Book, People, Guilt

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.7, Broadway Books

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• Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

  Aldo Leopold

  Land, Ezekiel, Belief

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.178, Oxford University Press

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• I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders." --Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

  Daniel H. Pink

  Running, Believe, Expression

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• Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Pain, Joy, Mindfulness

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• One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Time, Children, Age

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 51, 1799.

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• Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves - apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge - and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers - but not to us as psychologists - because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

  Marvin Minsky

  Believe, Knowledge, Thinking

  "K-Linesː A Theory of Memory". Cognitive Science 4, 1980.

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• The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Hate, Religion, Church

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.100, Library of Alexandria

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• Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Men, Cities

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.70, Penguin

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• A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation. Under the name of Anarchy, a new interpretation of the past and present life of society arises, giving at the same time a forecast as regards its future, both conceived in the same spirit as the above-mentioned interpretation in natural sciences. Anarchy, therefore, appears as a constituent part of the new philosophy, and that is why Anarchists come in contact, on so many points, with the greatest thinkers and poets of the present day.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Philosophy, Past, Names

  "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal". Lecture by Peter Kropotkin, translated by Harry Lyman Koopman, dwardmac.pitzer.edu. 1898.

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• Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

  Peter Singer

  Long, Littles, Philosopher

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.61, Princeton University Press

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• Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Nihilism

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, pp. 157-158, 1987.

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• The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Sunset, May, Dawn

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Atheist, Effort, Enemy

  "Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason". Book by Andrew Dickson White, pp. 167-168, 1915.

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• You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate.

  Christopher Moore

  Thinking, Inconsiderate

  Christopher Moore (2009). “Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings”, p.40, Harper Collins

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• I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.

  Donald Barthelme

  Believe, Arguing, Action

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• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

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• From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Given

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• Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Believe, Thinking, People

  "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson, Ch. 1, (p. 28), 1983.

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• It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Views, Opposites, Support

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly ImprobableFragility"”, p.32, Random House

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