critical QUOTES

21 " faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts... [you] still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced... the lines between sinner and saved [are] more fluid; the sins of those who come to church are not so different from the sins of those who don't... You [need] to come to church precisely because you [are] of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved you [need] to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away... that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world... "

― Barack Obama , The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

22 " Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 "

― John Steinbeck

23 " Inside CriticsThe critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our " inside critics" have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest spots. You might be told by the critics that you're too fat, too old, too young, not intelligent enough, a quitter, not logical, prone to try too many things...It's all balderdash!Some elements of these may be true, and it's completely up to you how they affect you. Inside critics are really just trying to protect you. You can:Learn to dialogue with them.Give them new jobs.Turn them into allies.You can also dismantle/exterminate them. "

24 " Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do. "

― Cory Doctorow

25 " I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another.

My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians.

When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer.

Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty. "

― Terry Tempest Williams

26 " Cognitive Intelligence defines a person's personality trait who utilizes critical thinking based on empirical evidence, logics and thorough understanding of the information during an intellectual argument or an educational setting where they acquire brand new concepts. "

27 " I know it’s hard sometimes to recognize how truly beautiful you are, and how truly worthy of love you have always been and will always be. It’s hard sometimes to see the truth of your divinity amidst the closed, judgmental opinions of the outside world, and of your own critical mind. But your beauty and your worthiness have nothing to do with anyone’s opinions, or anyone’s mind, not even your own. Your real truth lives in the heart, and your heart, as big and open and generous as it is, will never stop marveling at your stunning existence. "

― Scott Stabile

28 " A real Woman has the Spirit of Discernment, she's a critical thinker "

29 " Are you busy proving your worth or living it? A critical distinction "

― ,

30 " We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century. A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling. But that is precisely what I believe postmodernism best represents - a mood. "

― Ravi Zacharias , Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message

31 " 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

32 " Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.) "

― Alan Sokal

33 " The widespread success of science is too significant
an issue to be treated as if it were a happy accident that we are
free to enjoy without enquiring more deeply into why this is
the case. Critical realist achievements of this kind cannot be a
matter of logical generality, something that one would expect
to be attainable in all possible worlds. Rather, they are an ex-
perientially confirmed aspect of the particularity of the world
in which we live and of the kind of beings that we are. Achiev-
ing scientific success is a specific ability possessed by human-
kind, exercised in the kind of universe that we inhabit. I believe
that a full understanding of this remarkable human capacity
for scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that our
power in this respect is the gift of the universe’s Creator who,
in that ancient and powerful phrase, has made humanity in the
image of God (Genesis 1:26–27). "

― John C. Polkinghorne , Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship

34 " ...were these Essays of mine considerable enough to deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fall
out that they would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in the middle region. "

― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

35 " Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man. "

36 " In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”

Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. "

― Paulo Freire , Pedagogy of the Oppressed

37 " For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. "

― Alain de Botton , The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

38 " Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life. "

― Alain de Botton , Status Anxiety

39 " The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Outliers: The Story of Success

40 " Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls. "

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